The Irvania Blog

This afternoon I was field-testing the hammock in our back yard, enjoying one of the stunningly beautiful days we have frequently here in Northeast Pennsylvania. My wife was a few feet away digging in the garden. Well, actually, she was digging an anti-tank trench. I’m not sure why she would be digging an anti-tank trench in the back yard. I don’t think tanks would be able to make it up the steep embankment on the southern approach. But I digress.

So there I was, lying there in the hammock, a dachshund sleeping on my stomach. I was day-dreaming, watching the woodpeckers and chickadees and sparrows and catbirds and cardinals and grosbeaks and bluejays and orioles and condors circling overhead (odd that they would all fly in formation like that), and looking at the treetops. The leaves have come out full-force now so it’s nice to lie there looking at the treetops and pick out the different types of trees: ashes, oaks, sycamores, pines, walnuts, dogwoods, and… the larch.

That made me a bit sad: whenever I see or think about the larch trees, I remember that routine from Monty Python’s Flying Circus: “The larch. The larch.” It makes me feel old. It reminds me of my old circles of friends, who quoted Monty Python lines with rapidity and relish. That was 20 years ago though.  The Monty Python TV series ended about 35 years ago, and their most recent movie was about 23 years ago. My friends and I had seen every episode and every movie enough times to quote them all, but young folks today have barely heard of Monty Python if at all. Time, and comedy, has moved on.

This makes me sad because it reminds me of all the old friends I haven’t seen in many years. I reminds me of all the circles of friends I’ve had over the years:

The Oscoda lunch gang: Kato, Swatson, the Greater and Lesser of Two Evils.

The Bentwaters Hat Club: Bill, Todd, Ed, Steve, Bob, Lenny, Phil.

The Bloomsburg Area Gamers (BAGS): Doc, Mister Spock, Reeb, Bill G, Nick, the Ogre who later called himself Random, John Zed who hated to be called John Zed, Brett, Jim, the Bodnars, the Mabies, Billbo, Raymond.

The Hopatcong Gamers (HOGS): John, Mike, Larry, Replacement Larry, Ricardo, Pete, Phil, Marty, Bob, Chuck.

The Friday Night Irregulars: John C, John N, Nick, Terry, Paul, Vince, Dick, Sean, Young Stephen.

Not coincidentally, all but the first of those groups were gaming groups.

Doc and I and our wives get together once in a while for lunch, and I see some of the Hopatcong and Friday Night gangs at the big wargame conventions once in a while, but a lot of those old friends I haven’t seen in a long long time.

Is this what it’s like to get old?

Generally I don’t spend a lot of time surfing around the web looking for cool stuff. There’s a great deal of cool stuff out there, but I already have so much cool stuff piled around me that I can’t keep up with what I got now. Partly because of that, and partly because I have a hard time keeping up with regular e-mail, I rarely send around the “I found this cool thing on the web, check it out” sort of e-mails.

Having said that, I found this cool thing on the web, check it out: http://www.aginsinn.com/tilesRon.html .

It’s a website that’s got a bunch of free downloadable stuff on it for a game called Heroquest that I never got into.  It was published in 1989-1991 and was sort of a combination boardgame and miniatures wargame. The part I’m really interested in is in the “Tiles” section, especially the tiles created by Ron Shirtz. These are, in essence, playing boards that can be used with tactical wargames, board or miniature. I think most of the tiles on this website are intended for Heroquest but I think any and all of them can be used as-is for lots of other tactical games.  Since they’re JPG graphics files they can be easily re-sized for use with whatever size miniatures you’re using, or counters if you’re doing more of a boardgame.

The point of this rambling is that for many years I’ve wanted to do a tactical wargame set in the Generic Legions universe, using either 15mm or 25mm science fiction miniatures (I’ve got lots of both) on either a 2-d flat tileset or a 3-d layout with floor tiles and walls.  Many years ago in my “dungeoning” years my cohorts and I played a lot of tactical fantasy/medieval wargames using 25mm fantasy figures on cardboard “dungeon tiles”, which was a great deal of fun. Since then I wanted to come up with some sort of 3-d dungeon, and when I started sci fi gaming later on I wanted to do some sort of 3-d “spaceship crawl” game. There was a GW game called Space Hulk that did this sort of thing, but of course I wanted it set in the Generic Legions universe.

Looking at my notes, my latest thoughts on this type of game involve the characters from my first novel, although none of it really fits into the timeline or story arcs I have laid out for the first three books. Without giving too much away, I visualize each player in the game controlling one party/squad of figures, each led by one major character: Agrippa leading a squad of Gummibärenjägers (Bad Day commandos), Emily leading a group of intrepid Earthie adventurers, Voltoon leading a band of clerics, Sir Martin leading a squad of Irvanian Commandos, Grunthos the Barbarian leading a team of angry office workers, the Irvanian emperor leading a team of Slargeball players, the Bad Day emperor leading a group of minions, General Rattpitch leading a squad of Dweasel Jannitories, Jake being pursued by a pack of grandmothers… the list goes on and on.

Each player/team would of course have their own secret objectives to accomplish in order to win the game. Over the years I’ve been slowly picking up miniatures that look like they’d do for some of my characters, with or without modification. The board layout (”terrain” in wargamer-speak) would be made from something like the aforementioned tiles, set up as either a large spaceship or an installation of some sort. The Bad Day Military Headquarters Building and Expo Center, the J. Walter Christie Building (offices of the Bad Day government), and the Cathedral of Pain and Suffering all come to mind as good candidates for the location.

Sound like fun?