The Bloodpact Saga

The Bloodpact Saga

Chapter 1: The Seal of Decay

“Diz plaze iz hell…” the Kaptin muttered carelessly. The planet’s three suns had all reached a prominent enough horizon to shine light upon the wastes of the long dead imperial world. Bordrukk sniffed, as he put his cigar back to his mouth, sucking in the damp and acrid smoke that exhilarated his senses. His exhale blew a cloud of dark smoke, which for a second obscured the sight that was before him. He stared blankly upon the ruins of an old Forgeworld; the ground littered with factories and temples stretching beyond his sight in an overtly orderly, square-shaped fashion. “Umies…” He sighed; their precise and lavish constructions were so intensively built with great care and planning but were just as easy to demolish as any Ork Town, and Bordrukk would know; for as a Blood Axe Mercenary, he had served armies that had laid waste to both.

It did not matter where Bordrukk looked; it was eternally the same symptom. There was not one building that he could see that seemed worthy or indeed capable of yielding any significant loot. The buildings were grey, and even as the suns rose further into positions lofty enough to provide light upon the wrecked earth below; the sullen tone remained, as if the buildings were eternally cursed with the bleakness of decay. All was in ruins. He perceived an emptiness broken only by rubble and broken statues: the fallen remnants of their architects’ whim. Lying, snapped in two, they appear as if in protest to the indignity of a decaying death. Not that this presented itself to the Ork Kaptin in anything other than Goosebumps.

The discordant noise behind him took him away from his thoughts and he glanced around at his squad of Kommandos, busy as they were doing nothing but joking and shouting amongst themselves. “Shut it, yoo lot.” He growled at them. His small unit were a pretty disciplined lot, but they were still Orks, and prone to clownin’ abowt quite often, and usually at the wrong time. “But dere’s noffink ‘ere!” muttered Dreggitz, Bordrukk’s best ‘snikka’*. Bordrukk offered him and the rest of the unit a scowl. He rarely needed to do more than this, although it was hard not to simply share the statement, especially as he had also lapsed into a state of disbelief at their position.

(*Snikka: a term used to describe an Ork, usually a Kommando, that is adept at close quarter fighting and particularly when in reference to Kommandos, the ability to dispatch foes silently and quickly).

His mind was focussed on his orders. He had been ordered to hold his position, but it had been a good while since those orders had been given. His Boss, Gargutz, had been gone for a long time. He was finding it hard to understand how and where Gargutz had gone. It was pretty clear, at least to him; the place was a complete dump. Bordrukk had no idea what his new employer could have possibly found here. As far as he was concerned, the ‘umies may be a useful resource, but whatever it was that had happened to them had left nothing of interest to the Orks. The place looked so under the thumb of time that he had no idea how long this place had remained, for the planet itself seemed to have left it in the condition it was the day that it had begun to crumble.

Bordrukk stubbed out his Cigar on his left bicep, and looked around at his mob. They stood immediately to attention; they knew the expression on his face well. Ork Kommandos were a solid unit, they spent their lives together, and they knew each other so well that they barely needed to speak. Most communication was made via glances, various bodily gestures and hand movements; most of these had very slight variations. The unit knew them instinctively, even Ugzag, the yoof of the unit who had only been with them shortly before their campaign had resumed. The Kommandos were also fiercely insular and deeply mistrustful of outside authority, and particularly of orders: especially the boring ones that they didn’t like doing.

Bordrukk nodded at the unit. They responded in kind, formed up into a loose skirmish formation, and moved out. He knew exactly where they were heading; he had seen what had so fascinated Gargutz, and he had decided that their next action should be determined from this position. By this point, they had spread out, and were easily hidden to the untrained or focussed eye. Kommandos are adept at sneaking. It is believed that the Orks learned this from humans, whilst others believe Orks have always been capable of such techniques when hunting. It is hard to imagine that such big and brutish creatures were capable of such subtle movement.

The Kommandos had their craft practiced into a precise art. The second that their ship had landed upon the earth, they had all been out, searching buildings in small groups, and securing the area. Upon establishing a safe perimeter, they began to blend into the surroundings. Ork hands are particularly useful for crushing rock and debris, as well as grabbing huge handfuls of dirt and grit, which are then applied liberally upon the Ork’s person, used to form a colouring layer over cloaks and clothing, and a small amount of Fungus Brew or Ork saliva, added to a handful of crushed dirt and grit, mixed into a paste and applied to the skin. Kommandos are not squeamish about any camouflage; they are only seen to be noticeably less calm without it.

Their progress was always slow; Bordrukk didn’t believe there was ever a moment where the Kommandos shouldn’t benefit from the element of surprise. Dagsnik and Gulgor scouted ahead, whilst the majority of the unit slowly moved through whatever terrain laid ahead, using cover and moving silently. After some progress, a strange noise could be heard. To a Feral Ork, the sound would be the call of a Squig that had won a territorial fight with another Squig, but to the unit, it was a call that a body had been found. Bordrukk knew the caller; the subtle grunt in the voice identified the alerted sentry as Nazdakka, the oldest Kommando in his unit.

As they closed on Nazdakka’s position, the scent of death lay in the air. The old Kommando was crouched, leaning a slight upon the barrel of his Big Shoota. He stared at the Boss, who had already met a different gaze. The body hung upon a strange stone pillar by ancient binds, and seemed to remain in place by the merest of certainty; as if the wretched corpse itself also suffered from the same curse of timelessness that plagued the whole planet. The victim upon the strange pillar was once human. Its robes at one time could well have been a crimson red, but were now a lifeless shadow that bore little of the colour it had once been. The corpse was little but a decaying ske.leton; the lifelessness of the air, as bitter as it was, existed to delay the process of decay upon the few remaining shreds of sinew; all that remained to keep the pathetic corpse intact.

Bordrukk looked in fascination at what lay before him. He had seen things like this before, and it disturbed him that the humans, so quick to dismiss him as a mere savage, could do this to its own kind. The pathetic creature’s face was deformed; its jaw agape as if protesting in death at the indignity of decay. Gazing into the corpse’s eyes, Bordrukk wondered what had become of this human. He never did understand such brutality. Even in his own culture, the brutal displays of destruction and aggression of his fellow Ork failed to take hold in his mind. He had given everything he had to reach a position of isolation, to fight, hunt and kill. He wondered why the humans so often did the job for him.

Even an Ork could not miss the symbolism of the body that hung before them. It was as an example to others. Usually when a Warboss made a similar gesture, he’d knock the snot out of some uppity Nob. If the Nob was lucky, it would live, and it usually wouldn’t. But Orks did nothing so odd to the Ork’s corpse. An Ork was free in death; the battle was over, and the score, whatever it was, would be settled and laid to rest.

But at once, the question was answered. Ugzag the Yoof produced a strange item that seemed to have fallen from the corpse. It immediately caught his attention. It was a strange, thin and metal rectangular object. It glowed as daylight, a precious metal of high quality preserved by the thin air. Upon it were markings. Bordrukk immediately recognised it as Imperial Gothic, the language of the humans, more specifically, that of the Imperium. He did not understand the writing, but he did not need to. The symbol at the bottom of the plaque was familiar enough. He had encountered it before.

The Orks had sacked a planet he had been involved in a few Waaaghs back. The planet had changed hands numerously at that time, and the Imperial Forces had only recently crushed a Rebellion by settlements that had been tainted by chaos. Bordrukk had been part of a Mob that had raided a strange temple and slaughtered an odd collection of humans. The leader wore an elaborate white power armoured suit, and upon it was a symbol – an II. It was the symbol of the Inquisition. He now knew much about them, and knew that they enforced the will of their dominant religious figure, and tortured humans who had dismissed the teachings of their ‘God’, the Emperor of Mankind.

Bordrukk had not the wit to read the writing, but he knew this victim had been accused of some misdeed in the eyes of the Inquisition. The writing upon the plaque was as clear as day:

Exterminatus Hereticus
II

Bordrukk now knew that the humans had cleansed their own planet. As he looked around he began to wonder why. The situation disturbed him, but there was little he could do. It was then that a whistle rang in the air. It was a call, from one of the two scouts Dagsnik and Gulgor, a call to their location. Bordrukk gestured with his arms to move out, and the whole unit left the corpse to its eternal punishment.

Dagsnik and Gulgor lay up ahead, and they pointed towards the footprints of a suitably large group of Orks that they had been tracking. Bordrukk had noticed the prints of a number of Orks next to the strange corpse, and they had obviously headed this way. He looked upon his two scouts with a look that suggested his thoughts to be “Wat Uv It?” the two scouts responded by pointing to his left, in the corner of the building in which they now stood. It was a mural, depicting a strange creature. He had seen one or two of them before, and they were unnatural things that appeared as if out of nowhere. This one however, was different. It was a large, horned creature, with a strange humanoid face; it was stern yet equally fierce. It wore dark armour and held a large sword. The creature sat upon a throne, which itself sat upon a huge mound of skulls, surrounded by water. The water was red, as was the symbol below it. He had seen it before, and he knew the name for which it stood. He looked at it in disbelief. “Khorne” the Kaptin spoke with a tone of disgust. The mural slid to the side, and revealed a darkened staircase leading into the bowels of the planet.

Kaptin Bordrukk looked up at his mob. They returned a similar glance. Bordrukk looked into the opening that had only suddenly appeared; he saw nothing but an inky blackness. The more he looked into it, the more odd he felt. The opening seemed to widen, as if it was about to engulf him. He felt a strange feeling in his mind, and without any gesture, he began to move, cautiously, towards the opening. Hesitantly, the mob followed and they all descended into the darkness…

In The Grim Darkness Of The Far Future There Is Only Worse

In the Wargaming universe, the name Games Workshop requires no introduction; of their many games (of only a few of which they still bother to promote) Warhammer 40,000 is the best known, and their greatest breadwinner. GW has a staggering domination of the Wargaming market, a claimed percentage of somewhere around 99% of it. Not at all surprising for a company powerful enough to market itself with its own shop/store, bearing the company’s name in stark red and yellow lettering.

Games Workshop is the veritable Nintendo of the Wargaming world, with their own poster boy standing as a particular example of their success. Nintendo has Mario, the tirelessly boot stomping plumber; Games Workshop has the space marines. If you asked a GW fan to name a memorable symbol that best defines their products, you could safely bet that most would (reluctantly or not) say the Space Marines.

It is truly hard not to. As Halo has determined (surely developed from the idea of the Space Marines themselves) that a well armoured, otherwise quite uncharacteristic warrior with a deadly automatic weapon embodies enough inflated badassment to sell itself with very little effort. It is quite ironic that Space Marines are held as a rather innovative and original invention, considering that really, GW just took their Warhammer Fantasy system and plonked all their races (including armoured questing knights) into a (still rather magical and mystical) futuristic universe.

GW are not entirely unaware of this tendency, and their Space Dwarfs (well, Dwarves – The Squats as they were known) took a rather speedy exit just to avoid the blatant comparison; although retaining Space Marines (Knights), Space Orks (Orcs and Goblins – with a hint of Skaven innovation), Necrons (Undead and Tomb Kings), Imperial Guard (Empire with modern warfare thrown in), Eldar, Dark Eldar and the Harlequins (pretty much all of the Elves) and of course Chaos. The edition of the blatantly Anime Tau Empire and the disturbingly Aliens/Cthuluesque Tyrannids (who in my opinion share the Skaven theme with Orks) don’t necessarily hide GW’s fondness for taking as much popular and geek culture conventions as they can into their gaming settings.

The question is, does this matter? My answer is a perplexing mix of yes and no. Yes, because you cannot even look at a sentence in any GW work without reeling from an overdose of the cliché, finding it very easy to draw cultural and literary connections to other works. This would not be so bad if not for the utterly staggering amount of it that they have fitted into it of the many decades they’ve had to do it. If you spend your life in a vain search to locate ‘original’ material, you’ll find it hard pressed to do it at Games Workshop.

GW’s success however highlights one simple thing. People like the cliché. I know I do, because that is how stories work. The more you know before you approach something, makes it all the more easy to understand and communicate. What GW has done is make a living out of giving us, essentially, what we all want. Besides, it would be wholly unfair to say that GW hasn’t even attempted to spin their own yarns from it. In almost all of their games, they have. 40k more than any others has a vastly deep and interesting narrative. If there was one thing I’d say that was outstanding about Warhammer 40,000, it is the setting and the narrative attached to it.

The far-flung universe of Warhammer 40,000 is a dark and cynical time. Endless war, and a rogue’s gallery of demented races all entirely determined to wipe humanity off the face of the galaxy: just to show they truly care. Humanity’s ultimate weapon is of course the Space Marines, but that hasn’t stopped the foul Gods of chaos perverting some of their own to chuck back at them.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the 40k universe is that you literally cannot breathe for Space Marines. In the 40k section of any Games Worshop store they take up a majority of the shelf space, and if one of their staff is going to try and peddle something to you, it’ll be their power armoured poster boys. GW it seems quickly hit on the coolness factor of Space Marines and quickly realised they are 40k’s main selling point.

Unfortunately, it is disgustingly true. Everyone who plays 40k plays because of Space Marines. Perhaps because when they started up and first got hooked to the game, they started up playing space marines, because ‘they’re easy to use’, or simply through the course of playing fell in love with those inflated stats and highly resistant armour saves; or because they utterly hate the much-adored Space Marines so much that they spend most of their gaming life trying to destroy them, or working up schemes to destroy them. A lot of the older gamers (such as myself) have been through more than one of these phases, if not all of them. These days I am vehemently in the latter category.

As I have mentioned previously, the reason for their popularity is fairly obvious. Aside of most of the romantic and heroic storylines of the setting being devoted to them, on the gaming table they are bloody ferocious, ridiculously hard to kill, and annoyingly easy to use. Unfortunately, the background of Warhammer 40,000 shows that there is nowhere near as many Space Marines in the fictional universe as what you will see on the gaming table. Every marine death is a tragedy because in the story background, they are ridiculously difficult to replace with new troops as these super-human warriors take decades of genetic and biological manipulation and training to get to the stage where they are battle-ready.

The spotlight does tend to take its toll on the gaming experience. The marines have enough of their own codices (Codex Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Daemonhunters and the Marine Chapter Specifics: Space Wolves, Blood Angels, Dark Angels and Black Templars) that they can (and invariably do) alternate between Codex releases of non-marine factions and marine factions consistently.

With GW’s way of working, the newest Codex does tend to have a number of edges over the previous releases, and often this isn’t simply the fact that they are ‘new’. 40k (and WHFB as well) is being developed mid-release, so ideas are being taken further with subsequent releases. I assume the idea is to keep the system innovative between lengthy rulebook updates (which come around every 5 years), but the side-effect is leaving older codices behind, including books supposedly written for the same edition of the rulebook.

Imperial Guard and the loyalist Space Marines in particular have really broke away from some of the earlier books that will probably stay for most if not all of 5th Edition. The Chaos players are virtually catatonic (but more on that in a future entry), and the differences are rather noticeable. Fortunately the mutual points limit is a half-decent balancing factor, but some of the differences are utterly blatant. It is really hard to encounter a Space Marine army without a number of special characters in it, who are blatantly cheap and good for what they bring to the army, getting players screaming ‘cheese’ and ‘broken’ with such frequency that it has over-shrouded the outrage that many players muttered about the recent Ork update, that is already starting to be outclassed.

Of course some of the older books in particular are looking very, very outdated. The Dark Eldar Codex in particular is now 12 years old, and has seen 3 edition changes, and has been around since pretty much the first month of the release of the first edition it witnessed, 3rd Edition 40k (with only a slight expansion on their Wargear Section and some Vehicle Upgrades to show for all the time the Dark Eldar players have waited).

Of recent times, 5th Edition has made Dark Eldar competitive again, but you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who plays them, to an even lesser degree than of the Orks (before the new codex came out) even back when they were released. The few remaining Dark Eldar players are naturally terrified that they will be the next Squats, and make a rather blatant exit explained by a dramatic fluff event in a vain attempt to hide the fact that like the Squats, they had character, but didn’t sell very well.

You will hear some of the Squat players at this point mutter something about the Demierg that appeared in Battlefleet Gothic as an effort to suggest that the Squats weren’t entirely annihilated. But those players should bear in mind that all this means is that they were indeed annihilated, and that GW made their point clear about them with a catastrophically bad attempt at a comeback.

This brings me on to the main gaming system. Warhammer 40,000 5th Edition was warmly welcomed by most of its fans (hardly surprising, I did call GW the Nintendo of wargames providers), although some army’s players were noticeably dismayed. The easiest way to convey the main factions’ disappointment is with this picture:



There is one thing that Games Workshop attracts more than money spent on space marines, it is moaning. 5th Edition in particular has attracted a lot of it, and a considerable amount just from people like me on online forums. There is a lot of merit to this however, but before I point attention to the smelly parts of the ruleset, I will first say that I feel GW is far closer than they were at balancing than in 4th Edition, and that some of the changes has encouraged some use of actual tactics for a change.

Right when 5th Edition was released, you could find a picture of some bloke looking down upon the battlefield to demonstrate how the new line of sight system worked (a picture I have saved for prosperity, which I shall add when I remember where the hell I put it). That’s right, you look. True Line of Sight (or TLOS) is now the new way you select targets and determine how you see them in 40k. Before 5th Edition, the rules were a lot clunkier in that you had to determine how deep into cover the unit was, and there’d be a lot of arguments over what the cover was, and whether it could be seen (at least that’s the running argument on it).

Incidentally a number of games I have seen and took part in since 5th Edition have featured even more arguments over LOS than ever. It is hardly surprising. Not only will everyone second-guess what you can see, you have a subjective system that is certainly quicker but a lot less efficient. With the system of cover saves as it is there is very little intuitive about the system. What you have is a gimmicky system, based on the idea of getting you more immersed and trying to keep things ‘simple’.

“And with the new line of sight rules, like I said earlier, the whole perception of how you play your games has changed. You no longer stand aloof above proceedings; you get involved at a model's eye level, participating in every shot fired. It works, but above all it is fun.” (Warhammer 40,000 Design Notes)

The reason it doesn’t work is best emphasised by shooting-heavy forces such as Orks with lots of Shootas and Lootas, Tau and Imperial Guard. The majority of 40k terrain is built with accommodating miniatures in mind, making it easier for them to move through. It is almost impossible to fully hide a whole unit anymore, and what’s more is that any shots thrown their way are not hampered by difficulties to accuracy, but merely provide a ‘cover save’. Thus you can pepper armies with fire, and let them take whatever save they want, knowing any 2s and 1s are usually going to be bad.

TLOS isn’t necessarily bad. Other skirmish gaming systems use it, but it requires innovative rules design to be anything more than a gimmick. GW has not accomplished that. The disadvantage of cover is handed to the recipient of shooting attacks, not the other way around. Cover should prevent successful hits, not allow more and give a trivial save that most wont use. The only real advantage from it is ‘Go To Ground’ which is only really effective if you are sitting a unit on an objective and you don’t intend to use them.

What is truly sad is that a slight tightening of the 4th Edition cover rules would be overall a much fairer way of determining cover without having to change the 40k system to make new ideas work. What is truly ironic is that GW decided to scrap this and go with a new approach without bothering to change the 40k system to make the new ideas work. Something for another edition no doubt, the cynic would surely be forgiven for assuming they planned it that way.

The new missions are at least interesting, although it doesn’t take a huge genius to realise most of the credit goes to the designers of Dawn of War, and were merely fitted into the 40k system probably as an afterthought. They do however encourage actual tactics, such as actually moving your units. Running means combat armies are a little better than they used to be, and in many ways, the changes have worked to make the game at least more balanced (ignoring Codex Creep anyway).

Probably aside of TLOS, the main failure in the system is Wound Allocation. For a game trying to streamline things, it has attached a rather large breezeblock to the front. The system is just far too clunky to work. It also encourages the rolling ‘buckets of dice’ approach to gaming that tends to be a common argument as to why 40k is about as tactical as a game of snakes and ladders. Plus, it has led to a huge exploit, where multi-wound units can chuck wounds around for ages without dying so long as they are all uniquely equipped. This has made Ork Nobs in particular a much nastier unit than perhaps intended.

The main failing of GW’s release system is constantly faffing around with their games. There doesn’t seem to be any effort to balance it out or move towards something refined. It just seems a bit like jumbling up the elements every now and then to sell something with the same name as something a bit different. 40k is on the verge improvement, but every time it takes a step forward, it takes several back. We are far away from some cohesive proof as to why Warhammer 40,000 is one of the most popular Wargames on the planet.

This is longer than I wanted it to be, and probably old news to most of you. However as this blog is new, I’m playing catch-up, and I will be getting to newer, juicier issues soon, hopefully less verbosely.

Thanks for reading.

TWC.

Forget the power of the consumer and common sense, for so much has been removed, never to be returned. Forget the promise of progress and innovative game design, for in the grim dark game dev’s office there is only profit. There is no peace among the staff, only an eternity of faffing about and disaster, and the laughter of inferior men, living off the genius of long-departed gods.

In the future, there is only worse.

Wargames and Cynicism

I was tempted to open up with a discussion and defence of cynical works, but what would be the point? I’m sure by now we all know the deal. It is usually a lot easier to just go with the flow and assume that almost everyone on the Internet already expects angry people pretty much everywhere. The cynic, more than anyone else, is often surprised that most people aren’t completely livid by now.

For the most part, I’d like to avoid the Internet tendency to take negativity too far (hence why this blog will also be featuring articles and fluff), but obviously, there is little point beating about the bush when something is annoying you. If you’re sailing on a sea of turds it is often hardly worth the effort of getting scented sails for your boat.

My title of ‘Wargamer’ is a bit misleading, because I much prefer the more general term of ‘Hobbyist’. For me it is as much fun putting all those models together, converting a few and sticking paint on them as it is playing the games. I suppose the main reason most people complain about their hobbies such as Wargaming, is because generally the effort they put into it starts making the whole aspect of it personal. You start seeing things you don’t like about the game ruining your experience, because after all that personal investment you put into it; it does tend to annoy you when witnessing the company that provides you with it screwing it up.

You can see this fanaticism with webcomics, films, TV series’, computer games and everything else in popular culture. There isn’t a great deal of difference other than the extra time, blood, frustration, curse words and patience invested can make you a little more obsessive than you might be otherwise. There is one main thing that unites us all, our passion (or more likely fanaticism) that we put into it. It is often easy to forget that most people get angry because they care, and nothing makes you care more than change.

Ultimately, none of us like change, but the Wargamer actively fears it, especially if they play GW games, or at least did at one point. It’s not just the gamers who still experience Games Workshop either. Recently those involved with Privateer Press’ wargames (Warmachine and Hordes players in particular) have started to realise the stigma of ‘change’ isn’t just limited to GW. Those very few to experience Rackham before At43 and Confrontation: Age of Ragnarok, may remember the older version of Confrontation. I mentioned in my greetings post how I no longer play Confrontation. The change (the most radical of any wargame I’ve ever seen) is why.

When a game you love takes a radical u-turn, it is hard not to get more cynical. With change brings new rules, ideas and concepts. These aren’t necessarily bad, but in a competitive world where any business needs to make money, most of the change tends to revolve around improving the company’s ability to make more money than anything else. The ‘art’ or the ‘ethos’ of it can end up in the recycle bin with, what can be assumed, less than a moments’ hesitation.

It is a sad indicative of society that we find that moaning comes so easily. The media knows this so well that they can devote pages to doing it, or invoking it in their viewers/readers. They know it so well that they (particularly in British media) can often make stuff up just to add fuel to this endless moaning. You often hear the phrase that ‘everything is politics’ well, technically speaking, yes. Hobbies are however, how we try to distract ourselves from such things as politics. In our dependence on it, and our investment in it, we find that it as much political and just as prone to driving us completely mental over it as anything else.

Wargaming is one of those hobbies that is very diverse indeed. There is plenty of material to mull over, wax lyrical and complain about. Although I want to quickly get up to date with frustrations and such, the easiest place is to start at the beginning. For me, the beginning was with GW’s Warhammer 40,000, which although wasn’t my first wargaming experience (that was Necromunda) I started 40k about 15 years ago, and it really doesn’t take all that long to get annoyed with GW, it just gives more fuel to resentment.

You could view this post as the introduction to the Wargaming Cynic Series, as I set what will hopefully be the tone of a series, which I’ll try to keep more or less on the rails of the constructive, with a little deconstruction for artistic affect (honest!). The temptation is to spout into rants about everything, but let’s keep it strictly trivial shall we?

Thanks for reading.

TWC.

Greetings!

Hello everyone, Wargaming Cynic here, reporting for duty...

As the title suggests, I am a cynic who also plays wargames. Wargames such as Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Necromunda, Warmachine, Hordes, Confrontation (well, used to), Anima Tactics, and an increasingly large number of which I don't bother with any more (I still talk about confrontation, so it hasn't dropped off my list yet). Generally though, if it is a wargame there's a fair chance I'll have an opinion on it if I've experienced it. I may dare to discuss RPGs such as D&D, Cyberpunk etc. But don't necessarily count on it.

Obviously if you're not much interested in Wargames, I'm probably not a blogger you want to spend too much time reading.

I decided to start a blog to vent the increasing frustration I am getting with this hobby. I do so with a great amount of regret and hesitation, as the Internet is already rife enough with such vapid verbosity; although it is something I have already contributed to on a number of forums. I mostly do it because I am unlikely to matter, and because I'm starting to feel really bad about doing it on public forums. At least here, people are actively choosing to read it.

I still need a place to vent, because ultimately although I am criticising and ranting about things in popular culture, I am doing so because somewhere in my increasingly blackened heart, I still care and would like nothing better than to be happy about it. Unfortunately, that is rather unlikely. They say that there is no pleasing some people, and I could well be one of them. I started being a fervent critic of Wargames once I started writing a few of my own, and learnt how many things I utterly disagreed with.

In addition to the occasional rant, I find my favourite outlet (although one I am more finicky about) to be in the writing of background stories (fluff if you want the Internet term). Mostly when sharing on the Internet, I tend to keep it to fanfluff from Warhammer 40,000, which is my favourite wargaming fluff setting (and not much else). As a lifelong Ork fan, most of it will be from an Orky slant.

A Blogger Pal of mine has told me I can organise these blogs into groups (although I have no idea how), so I would expect mostly that I'll jump between ranting and writing fluff with such an erratic behaviour it is best to try and not attach a logic to it. Nor should anyone expect updates of any of them to be consistent. I write erratically and, especially with fluff, to the point of anal perfectionism.

The main threads to keep an eye out for are:

Obviously the main feature is The Wargaming Cynic Series, as it happens to be the title of the Blog, I've forced my hand into using it as such. It will mostly read like a cynical diary of my experiences with Wargaming, and in particular, a lot of moaning about GW (Games Workshop).

A slight subsection of the above series is The Wargaming Cynic Articles Series (usually TWC Articles for short), which will entail various articles and such I have written with the aim of usually getting a few laughs and being a little informative (preferably in that order). This section will likely separate out into named series' (such as the potential Odditsee series) once I start figuring out which ones I can be bothered to post up.

In the realm of fluff, there may be a number of one-off stories, but I have a few running stories that will develop a large story over a long time. The first is The Bloodpact Saga, a dark story about Orks, Chaos and big swords. Very exciting.

The second long running story series is Wurrgitz, otherwise known as Madboyz. The story details the lives of some rather perplexing Madboyz. I wish I entirely made the concept up, but no, GW got there first. This is not a very serious series, and will enjoy spending most of its time messing with the 40k canon in ways it really wished it didn't.

There will also be one-off stories from time to time and a fair bit of general ranting about other things. I'm going to try and keep it in popular culture, because as far as politics and religion goes, it's best not to get involved.

Thanks for reading.

TWC.