Thursday, September 12, 2013

In Which I Find a Dead Tree Copy of Little Wars

While driving through town today, I decided to stop in at 2nd & Charles and see if I could find something to spend my credit on. Something game related, preferably.

There wasn't much in the way of older rpg material there, today. Some 2e stuff. Buncha 3e stuff.

Old Warhammer stuff. The wargame, not the RPG.

And someone had dumped a shit-load of Rifts!

Curiously, people are always dumping shit-loads of Rifts at 2nd & Charles. 

Then I spotted a small little book, almost hidden.

Little Wars: Including an Appendix on Kriegspiel by H. G. Wells. With an Introduction by Michael J. Varhola and a Foreward by Gary Gygax.

The Ur-text of Wargaming! Woo-hoo! It's the 2004 Skirmisher Publishing edition. I was just thinking a couple of days ago, that I wanted to get a copy for my library. So, I snagged it!

From Mr. Gygax's Foreward:
"Consequently, Little Wars influenced my development of both the Chainmail miniatures rules and the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. For example, it established the concept of a burst radius for cannon rounds, an idea that was translated into both the Chainmail catapult missile diameters and the areas of effect for Fireballs in D&D."
For those interested, the text is available online Here.