Hello to all,
Following recent messages on the WAB mailing list asking 'what's happening next?', I thought you all might be interested in the following message I sent to Steve Neate, editor of Slingshot, about our 'work in progress'. The Open Day I refer to is an event I'm hoping to hold at the end of the year. Since I wrote this message John Lambshead has been in touch, and it looks like that we *may* be anle to get his book out this year if we can get it edited and illustrated in time...
Jervis
-------------Forwarded Message-----------------
From: Jervis Johnson,
To: Steve Neate, INTERNET:editor@soa.org.uk
Date: 02/02/99 22:23
RE: WHW News
Hello Steve,
In my excitment about the 'WHW & Friends Open Day', I quite forgot to include any news about things we're working on at the moment. None of this information is secret, so please feel free to forward it or copy it wherever or whenever you wish. Anyway, here goes...
Nigel Stillmen's 'Chariot Warfare' supplement for WAB is in production at the moment. This is very much a labour of love on Nigel's part, and is shaping up to be a very intersting book. The core of the book are a set of army lists for the main armies of the Biblical period (Sumerian through to Assyrian), each presented in the rather lengthier format used for the lists in the WAB rules, rather than the short '2 page' format we've used in Armies of Antiquity. Each list is backed up by a short introduction that puts the army in its historical context, and is backed up with painting, modelling and army collecting tips. Nigel is very taken with the new chronology, and has been doing a lot of work over the last 3 or 4 years converting timelines over. Just today he was showing me the 'military history' timeline he has worked out for the book, and which is basically the distilled version of all the work he's been doing. It really is very exciting stuff, and I'm hoping to be able to convince Nigel that a sneak preview might make a good Slingshot article. Whatever the outcome of this, we're hoping to get the book through production in March or April in time for a summer release.
Following Nigel's book we'll be starting production work on the 'Age Of The Vikings' supplement. This is being written by Stephen and Duncan Patten of Gripping Beast, and is shaping up into another interesting project. The Pattens are concentrating on the period of the Viking raids in Britain (roughly 750ish through to 1066). The book includes four main lists (Vikings, Saxons, Celts and Normans), again written in the long style of the WAB rules, with a historical context, etc., for each army. The Celtic and Saxon lists include a number of choices and options that allow a player to make them more 'specific'; for example, some of the entries in the Celtic list is can only be used if you have a Welsh army, others only if you have an Irish army, and so on. In the Saxon list you can take a 'generic' type of Fryd unit, but can also include Fryd from specific counties that have special options or rules. However, all of the specific Fryd you use must come from adjacent counties, so you couldn't include a Cornish Fryd in an army with a Northumbrian one for example. Possibly most exciting of all, John Blanche, GW's art director, is going to be doing the cover and some internal art for this book. John is best known for his fantasy work, but in earlier days did quite a lot of historical work as weel (including some art for Slingshot he tells me).
That's probably all we'll manage to get out this year. However, John Lambshead is writing a supplement on the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The early work I've seen so far has some very interesting scenarios, and lots of useful stuff about running campaigns and small scale skirmish games. In the States, Allen Curtis is working on a Punic Wars supplement, which will probably be the most dedicated and 'focused' of the all of the WAB supplements, concentrating as it does on two armies in a well documentated war. As an aside, one of the things we've tried to ensure with all of the supplements is that each author is left with a fairly free hand to choose what they put in the book and the format they decide to use, and, as I hope you can tell from these brief notes, this is resulting in an interestingly eclectic set of books, that address a wide variety of different historical and game themes.
For my own part I've started work on 'Battles Of Antiquity', which is basically a selection of scenarios and army list varients for use with the armies in the WAB book and AoA. I've been rather taken with the 2 page format we developed for AoA, and have managed to come up with a similar 2 page format for the scenarios. The idea is for the scenario's to be playable with any two armies, but for them to include varients for the army lists based on the two armies that actually fought. I'm going to try and make sure that we cover quite a lot of smaller actions and skirmishes, as well as the larger battles that were not simply a straight-forward 'line up and fight' pitched battle, as I think that WAB's ability to change scale and cope with all kinds of odd special rules like this is one of it's main strengths. Anyway, the first scenario has worked out well and fits into the allocated two pages, so now it's just a case of picking twenty more! Following on from this there has been some loose talk of doing a 'Campaigns Of Antiquity' supplement, providing a selection of camapign ideas and rules based on an advanced version of the campign rules from the rulebook which we've come up with.
That's pretty much it for the ancient period, at least at present. However, we've also got a set of English Civil War rules that are pretty well advanced, and we've also being playing some games using the new 40K rules as a basis for 19th Century colonial games. Ricks WW2 version of the 40K rules are now on a back burner while he concentrates on a project for GW, but Andy Chambers and myself have been thinking of trying out some WW2 games using a modified version of my Epic game system with 20mm models.
Well, what I thought was going to be a quick follow-up has turned into a fairly lengthy tome, so I think I'll end here. It's late now and I've had a long day, so I hope the message makes sense. If not don't hesitate to get in touch and I'll be happy to fill in any bits that are unclear!
Jervis Johnson