I´m very interested in reading the wargame books by Donald Featherstone. What´s the regular way of getting hold of these?

Obscene amounts of money?
PDF?
Piracy?

Any help appreciated.

You're not alone. I guess abebooks.com will have to be the way to go. Lots of titles, many under $30.

Also, there's a reprint of Charles Grant's The War Game out there (for GBP 20 IIRC). Some British dealer is offering Tony Bath's little book on wargame campaigns for slightly less than that.

I think I´m leaving the commercial RPGs for a while to spend money on that shit. Traveller obviously excluded.

Marc? It´s nearly April...Mongoose?...SJG?...Anyone?...This is Free Player SettoWulf, publisher number one not responding...

BTW:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~beattie/timeline/milex.html

Interesting!

Will peruse more closely once I'm back from Europe next week.

BTW, I'm gravitating to what seems to be all the rage among the OSW Renaissance movement: pseudo-18th-century wargaming/worldbuilding.

The hub:

http://emperor-elector.blogspot.com/

*Why* it should be that period, of all things, I've no idea. Perhaps, for one thing, because it's a great fit of abstract rules, clockwork-like warfare, and stylized minis and terrain. Warhammeresque Landjaeger would be absurd, bu so would a Tom Meier style.

Right now  I´m fantasizing about MyEurope1453: Fall of Konstantinopelstein or somesuch.

I just need to convince one of those DBA-junkies...alas, conivncing a minis player to start another project is frighteningly easy, though.

It is. What's MUCH harder is to make them follow it through to the end. As in, they buy lead for $100, they base half of that force, they prime a quarter, they finish a handful... and then they sell the stuff on ebay because Old Glory had a sale on those brand new Ruritanian Hussars. 5% off, it's a steal! So, they base half of those, etc.

That's an interesting article.  Thanks for the link, Sett.

I command everybody to read the wired article, that Anemone linked to.
http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2008/03/ff_gygax?currentPage=all#

The first part is ultra-important.

Also: Photographs from before the corn-syrup. I so want to be the guy sitting behind the tanks and next to dumbo-eared-scrawny guy.

Thinking of it, I just need to get myself glasses again. Horn-rimmed, with crew-cut: too tasteless and hipster like? Dunno, maybe if I wear a Nixon/Strauß election badge it´ll be possible.

I´m so leaving commercial RPGing.

What we need is wargaming clubs. That´s what the adventure gaming hobby needs. But not as nostalgia, rather as creative millieu.

What would such a rennaissance need?

I´m brooding about that for two weeks now.

Sadly ripped PDF's are usually the best way to go. Other than that, eBay and trying out the bigger wargaming sites like TMP (boo, hiss) or Frothers. Used to be a website with downloadable PDF's of loads of Charles Grants stuff but it appears to have gone down.

I'll just quietly gloat about my shelf of Featherstone and his contemporaries, although I must confess I'm missing a couple of the Tank Battles in Miniatures series and Wargames Campaigns took some tracking down....

BTW, I got one book for Birthday from my family.

Sadly, I feel as if I´ve already transcended Featherstone´s insight. Wow, did I really type and think that? Yes, I did.
Featherstone is caught up in lots of military history myths / master narratives that I´ve no interest to pursue further. Still an inspiring read, but strangely disappointing. I should have gotten my hands on them fifteen years ago.

A similiar example was reading the designer´s notes and strategy tips to WiF fifteen years ago. Back then, reading that OPENED my mind to many things. Nowadays, if I go back to that booklets, I only see the limitations of the author.

Now I still have to hunt them [Featherstone´s works] as historical documents of how the wargaming hobby used to be, not so much as a design help for my own shit.

QuoteWhat we need is wargaming clubs. That´s what the adventure gaming hobby needs. But not as nostalgia, rather as creative millieu.

Oh, Sett, you are as right as the rain on that!! Literally, everything truly brilliant about our hobby started in a wargaming club. RPGs were really just a sub-system for those bigass campaign wargames which would allow you to play a character, an army, and a nation all at once.

All of those old Featherstone, Bath and Grant books can only really be understood in the context of that kind of club. Many of Featherstone's et. al. design decisions were made to make running their huge club game both manageable for a referee and competitive and fun on several levels for the players. The milieu & rules crunchiness developed as the group demanded NOT as the designer willed it, unlike today, where full-fledged complex rules & campaign settings appear before anyone plays them. One guy grinding away on a game cannot compare creatively to something that grew out of a cooperative gestalt. Bring back the gaming societies!

Lost all my old wargaming books decades ago but Featherstone, Grant and Bath are pioneers and only of historical interest these days - I can't imagine anyone playing with their rules outside of a convention nostalgia event.

What they did have was a very English style of writing which I do rather miss - lots of silly jokes like the margravate of Bodden-Bumberg.

And they never for a minute pretend to be serious military historians - they're just grown men playing with toy soldiers and having fun.

I would challenge your last assumptions, but it´s best to pursue the hobby in that way you imply.

BTW, why would you not play with their rules-mindeset? That´s the most important aspect in my view. That´s the culture to strive for.