The Crime-Solving Vault

February 23, 2021
tabletop
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Those of you who have been following along with my recent digressions back into the world of tabletop gaming (sorry about all that) may be aware that, over the last year or so, I’ve exposed myself to all manner of new and new-to-me games, several of which I’ve already written about as part of my new recurring column on board games over at Unwinnable. (The column on a generally social activity that began exactly when we could all no longer be social anymore, because I have truly incredible timing.)

Of those, some have quickly become favorites. I recently wrote for Unwinnable about Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower, just in time for the folks at Games Workshop to announce the latest incarnation of the Warhammer Quest line: Cursed City, which is essentially the Warhammer answer to Castlevania. So naturally, that’s what I’m really excited for right now.

In all this, though, I’ve hardly mentioned what has rapidly become probably my favorite of all the new-to-me games I’ve experienced: Warhammer Underworlds. For the uninitiated, Underworlds is the smallest and most intimate of GW’s various skirmish wargames. Played across a couple of hexed game boards that fit easily on the kitchen table, with warbands numbering as few as three models and never more than nine, Underworlds makes even games like Necromunda, Warcry, or Kill Team feel epic by comparison.

I’ve long realized that I was more attracted to skirmish games than all-out wargames. The bigger armies simply tax my energy levels too much. I have fun, but I end the process feeling exhausted and wrung out. With Underworlds, I hit a sweet spot.

It isn’t just the smaller scope that appeals, though. I like the turn limit, the necessity of shepherding what resources you have carefully because you only have three rounds in which to accomplish your goals, and only four activations per round. I like the way that play alternates back-and-forth between players, and I like that your goals may not be best served simply by defeating the enemy.

I like the cards, which bring a level of randomness to the proceedings that dice alone cannot. Your goals will shift as the match progresses, as will the tools you have at your disposal. This takes some of the pressure of strategizing off, at least for me, and forces me to accept the hand I’m dealt with equanimity, and make the best of it. This is good for my anxiety.

Most of all, though, I love the warbands. I love the way each character has a name and a role, like positions on a team. I love the way each one brings personality to their fighter, so that each one feels like a legitimate loss when they fall. I love that, while there is deck-building, there is no army building. The warband is the warband – there’s nothing you can do to change it. I love the way all the fighters in the warband go together, like an adventuring party under your control.

When I first got into Underworlds, it was because of one warband: Mollog’s Mob. Anyone who knows me at all will not be surprised in the least when I say that Mollog’s Mob is not only the best of all possible warbands, it remains my favorite and probably always will. But something else I came to love, as I got into the game, was the “collectible warband” aspect of it.

While other wargames encourage you (by dint of the fact that they are expensive and models are plentiful, if for no other reason) to pick a faction or two and stick with it, collecting multiple warbands in Underworlds is not only feasible, it actually makes tactical sense, as each warband comes with unique universal cards that can be used with any of the others.

I didn’t start doing it because it made tactical sense, though. I just love my stupid little plastic friends, and I enjoy pushing them around on their hexes and making the fantasy equivalent of blim-blam noises (or, in the case of the Thundrik’s Profiteers, actual blim-blam noises).

“An elegance approaching the supernatural”

February 12, 2021
cinema, thoughts
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Why horror?

It’s a question that anyone who produces – or even consumes – horror in preference to most other forms will run into sooner or later, and probably frequently. Even once you’ve ensconced yourself among others who share your predilections, you’ll find yourself defending the type of horror that is your preferred poison. Why monsters over more psychological fare? Why slashers instead of more grown-up stuff? Whatever your tastes, someone will want to know why.

Sometimes, that someone will be you.

For years, I assumed that I wouldn’t like giallo films. On paper, they seem like the diametric opposite of what I’m normally after when I come to horror. Infamous for their brutal kills and gratuitous nudity, they make a point of victimizing women and have established problems with misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, often relying on pseudo-psychological explanations that are simply insulting to anyone with actual mental illness, if taken at face value.

Those are all things I Do Not Like, and they are all emphatically true of many gialli. And yet … and yet … and yet … I kind of love them. Not all of them, of course. Who loves all of any subgenre? But a large subset – indeed, most of the ones I’ve seen, especially those by Mario Bava and Dario Argento, recognized masters of the form.

So, if I don’t love so many of the things that giallo are famous for, what is it I love about them? Well, I do love one thing they’re famous for – their scores, which are almost unerringly great, and often used to phenomenal effect. And those scores help to contribute to the larger thing that makes me love them – a sense of weird menace that pervades every frame of the genre’s best installments.

While watching Sergio Martino’s Torso – a movie it seems like I shouldn’t like, if ever there was one – I came across a seemingly throwaway line near the beginning of the film that has burned in my mind ever since. “Everything is bathed in an elegance approaching the supernatural.” The speaker is describing artwork, but he could just as easily be summing up what I love about giallo.

Sure, some of my favorite gialli are ones that are also overtly supernatural, the kind that purists would insist “don’t really count.” Pictures like Suspiria, for instance. But even in a film like Blood and Black Lace, Evil Eye, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, or Opera, that “elegance approaching the supernatural” is there, making the films feel supernatural, even if their ultimate explanations are more prosaic.

It’s this aspect that I think led Ross Lockhart to combine the giallo with another uniquely European tradition in Giallo Fantastique, and it’s what I think the best of the stories in that volume capture. It’s certainly what I was going for in my own contribution, “The Red Church.” And it’s what I’ve striven toward every other time I’ve dipped my toes into the giallo waters, most recently in “Chanson D’Amour,” my “timeloop giallo” that’s coming in a future issue of Nightmare Magazine.

Really, though, it’s what I’m after when I come to most any kind of horror. Maybe not always elegance, but always a sense of atmosphere that makes even the mundane feel touched by the numinous.

If there is just one reason “why horror,” it’s probably that.

Sailing the Seas of Fate

February 2, 2021
freelancing, news, privateer press, tabletop
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For those who have been following along with my recent adventures getting into (or back into, as the case may be) D&D, dungeon crawlers, board games, and so on, the latest installment of my “I Played It, Like, Twice” column is up at Unwinnable today, marking the confluence of all of those interests and more.

As I say over there, Warhammer was one of my earliest fandoms, and it was followed in short order by the Elric stories of Michael Moorcock. Both those and other things, along with my obsession with dungeon crawl board games with their delightful miniatures and tiles, all crash together in Warhammer Quest, a game that has been released in a variety of forms over the years.

As I mentioned in the column, I actually had the very first copy of Warhammer Quest, back when it neither needed nor had any subtitle. It was a bit of a mess in a lot of ways, but there was something magical about those illustrated dungeon tiles, the sensation of reaching a plastic doorway and turning over a card to see what waited on the other side, never quite knowing.

I’m happy to say that Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower keeps more than a little of that magic alive, and in a game that plays better than its predecessor ever did. I’m unhappy to say, though, that it’s now well and truly out of print. The game’s most recent incarnation, Blackstone Fortress, is a big deviation, taking the setting to the “grim darkness of the far future” of Warhammer 40,000. I haven’t played it yet, but it’s sitting on my shelf. Waiting.

Shortly after I finished writing today’s article, though, and shortly before it went to print, Games Workshop announced the next iteration of the Warhammer Quest franchise. Cursed City takes the action back to the Age of Sigmar and sounds like Castlevania by way of Warhammer. As I said on social media when the news broke, “It was nice knowing you, money.”

Warhammer Quest is also far from the only iteration of the popular setting that I’ve been enjoying during the pandemic, either. I’ve gotten heavily invested in Warhammer Underworlds, which released its new season recently, and which is probably the most fun I’ve ever had playing a tabletop wargame.

My favorite warband is Mollog’s Mob for … obvious reasons. But one thing I love about the game is its ability to allow you to (affordably) collect warbands, instead of collecting individual models for one faction, and having to leave the others on the vine.

While I’ve been getting back into Warhammer stuff, I’ve also not forgotten some of my other loves, and I recently had the opportunity to do quite a bit of work on the newest iteration of the Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game from Privateer Press, this time compatible with 5e D&D. The Kickstarter for the books that I helped write is still underway and, as of this writing, has nearly quadrupled its funding goal, with a little over a week left.

I think it’ll be an interesting thing, both for newcomers to the setting and old hands who, like myself, have been around since the original Witchfire Trilogy all those years ago.

While I’ve been immersed in games a lot more lately – both writing and playing, or at least thinking about playing – I’ve also been hard at work on other things. The pandemic damaged my attention span for watching movies, but in January I finally seem to have gotten it back, and I’ve been back doing reviews again. I also contributed a second H Word column to Nightmare Magazine, about victims, volunteers, and how the Vietnam War changed horror.

I guess columns have been where it’s at for me, lately. In addition to that, and my aforementioned board game column at Unwinnable, as well as my “Grey’s Grotesqueries” column in Weird Horror, I just started a new monthly column at Signal Horizon, dedicated to deep dives into horror television series. If all goes according to plan, the first full year of “Something Weird on TV” will be dedicated to Friday the 13th: The Series, a before-its-time horror anthology-hybrid show that I had never actually seen even a single episode of before starting this column.

So that’s (some of) what I’ve been up to. To bring us back around to the beginning of this post, I used to have a handful of worn paperbacks of Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories that I read and re-read throughout high school. One of those was The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, which a friend had defaced by adding the word “Moon” after “Sailor” in ballpoint pen.

I don’t know if I still have that copy, but I hope I do.

Iron Kingdoms

January 26, 2021
cool stuff, news, privateer press, tabletop
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Remember back in November when I said that I was working on a game writing project that I couldn’t talk about because it was under NDA? This is what I was working on.

Iron Kingdoms: Requiem is far from the first piece of game-related writing that I’ve done for Privateer Press. Back in 2017, I produced a Warmachine tie-in novel that was the first novel I’ve ever written. I wrote very nearly all of the Legion of Everblight content for the previous iteration of the Iron Kingdoms RPG, not to mention adventures and other content for same.

For this, though, I had a chance to do more. I’m not at liberty to say just which parts of Requiem I worked on, but all told I wrote around 40,000 words of the core book. And I had some creative liberties this time around that I had never gotten to flex on a project like this before.

For those who know me, you know that I came up on fantasy tabletop war games. Warhammer was one of my first fandoms, and in college I switched allegiances to Warmachine, partly because, while I had never really been able to afford either hobby growing up, the smaller scale of Warmachine battles appealed.

That was only part of it, though. I also loved the world that Privateer Press had cooked up – something one notch further even than steampunk, like if the tropes of Tolkienesque classic fantasy existed in a setting that had advanced to roughly the technology level of the First World War. I loved the on-the-table dynamic of the warcasters and their warjacks and, later, loved even more the warlocks and their monsters, including my beloved gators.

Perhaps more than anything else, I loved the Monsternomicons – especially those created for the earliest version of Iron Kingdoms, which I still consider some of the best tabletop gaming bestiaries ever created. I have original pieces from those first Monsternomicons hanging above my desk as I type this. (Of Rhinodons, in case you’re curious.)

I’ve owned every iteration of Iron Kingdoms roleplaying since the setting was first introduced with the original Witchfire Trilogy for D&D 3.5. I loved the second edition – the Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game, which I had the pleasure of writing a little for – even while I also acknowledge its limitations, especially for those not already versed in Warmachine and Hordes.

And so it felt like a homecoming, of sorts, to contribute some of my work to bringing his new version of the Iron Kingdoms RPG back to compatibility with the world’s most popular roleplaying game – 5e, this time. For those who’re new to the setting, I hope it’ll bring you at least one good fight on a riverboat and/or train. For those who’re old hands, hopefully there’s some fun updates in this, which is the first major sourcebook to come out after the events of The Claiming.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about? I dunno, maybe consider picking it up. The Kickstarter is live right now and has an affordable early bird package. It’s already funded, so there should be plenty of stretch goals unlocked. And the game is designed to be accessible to new players. Plus, it runs on a 5e engine, so chances are you already more-or-less know how to play it.

I’ve already been paid for my work, so I don’t make any more if you back it. But feel free to put a note in with your pledge telling them I sent you, and that they should hire me for more stuff in the future. Can’t hurt.

Shame

January 14, 2021
thoughts

Let’s be clear: Yes, there was absolutely an attempt to “steal” the 2020 presidential election. It was not some vast, secret, underground conspiracy of dead people voting and other plot points lifted directly from a Simpsons episode. It happened in broad daylight, in plain sight, and it was perpetrated by an array of right-wing groups (including Trump himself) in an effort to secure a second term for Donald Trump. It failed.

Joe Biden was elected president by both a (vast) majority of the citizens of the United States and by the Electoral College, in an election as free and fair as elections can be in a system overrun with gerrymandering and voter suppression that overwhelmingly favors Republican candidates.

Any discussion about the similarities or differences between the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer and the mob of armed insurrectionists who stormed the capitol building that focuses on their comportment misses the point entirely. BLM was protesting in an effort to stop extrajudicial executions by police officers. The insurrectionists were attempting to overthrow the results of an election in order to install a dictatorship, encouraged and assisted by the sitting President of the United States.

How they went about it matters less than the fact that their goals were absolutely necessary in one case (BLM, in case it needs to be said), horrifically unjust in the other.

Donald J. Trump has been a self-serving disgrace, unfit to hold public office, since long before he ever ran, and his election to the highest office in this country will remain a disgrace long after he is gone.

I will not be taking questions at this time.

It’s About Time

December 30, 2020
cinema, guignol, news, on writing, painted monsters, year in review
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This post is not actually about the 1992 Amityville Yard Sale sequel about an evil clock. Just getting ahead of that, to spare you the disappointment. No, this is about kicking 2020 in the ass on its way out the door, and to that end, I just want you to know that there won’t really be a traditional year end retrospective around these parts.

Tonight, at the Horror Pod Class Study Group on Facebook, Tyler Unsell of Signal Horizon and I will be getting together to talk about the (precious few) high points of this trash fire of a year, and over at Unwinnable I contributed a blurb or two to the various best of the year lists, but for the most part, 2020 was garbage and we’re all happier to have it in the rear view.

Was the best movie I saw this year really Underwater? Maybe. Was very nearly the only book I read this year Adam Cesare’s wonderful Clown in a Cornfield? Also maybe. Did I buy a bunch of tabletop games that you mostly can’t play at the best of times (because who has that kind of free time) and definitely can’t play in the midst of a pandemic? Almost certainly. Did I get back into Dungeons and Dragons just in time to go into social isolation and then write about how racist it is? You bet I did!

Does any of that matter, in a world where people are dying and laid off and struggling to get by while the ghouls in their high towers play politics with our lives and balk at even so much as throwing us the scraps from their table? Not one iota.

This is getting a little heavy, though, so let’s pump the breaks. I have some good stuff to talk about. We all learned that octopuses like to punch fish, and Painted Monsters took top honors in a best-of retrospective. And hey, if you’d like to take their advice and pick up either Painted Monsters or Guignol, both are currently on sale (along with the entire rest of the Word Horde catalog) direct from the publisher.

For those who may be genuinely curious about the stuff I normally include in an end-of-the-year wrap-up, I watched fewer movies in 2020 than I have in a while. The lockdown had the opposite effect on my viewing habits than it did for a lot of other people, and I found it hard to watch (or read, or write) much of anything I didn’t have to.

Fewer than usual still means 248 movies over the course of the year, though, 155 of which I watched for the first time, meaning that I, at least, breezed by my goal of watching more new-to-me movies than not each year, even if my overall total was down. Among those, high points that didn’t come out anywhere near this year included Hercules in the Haunted World, The Spiral Staircase, Humanoids from the Deep, Mill of the Stone Women, The Outing, Psychomania, Next of Kin (1982), exploring the films of Shinya Tsukamoto for the first time, Prom Night 2, WitchTrap, The Killing (1956), and watching The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time on Christmas Eve.

I already wrote about some of the stories I was proud of seeing published this year – and ones that I’m looking forward to in the future – and this year I also started two new regular columns, one in Weird Horror about, well, weird horror, and one at Unwinnable as much about wanting to play board games as about playing them. I got bylines in The Pitch, our local cool-kid newspaper here in Kansas City, and I started writing an occult cyberpunk novella for Broken Eye Books that I’m currently behind on. (Sorry about that.)

All the way back when I made my very first post of the year ten centuries ago, 2020 had already punched us in the mouth not even one week in with the death of our beloved cat, and I said back in that post that “sometimes the only thing you can do then is grin with blood in your teeth.” I was such a sweet summer child in that moment, and I had no idea how much harder 2020 was about to come at us, but those of us who are still standing got out the other side of this entirely arbitrary calendrical delineation, so let’s at least flip it the bird while we’re burning to death.

If you have the stomach for a somewhat more normal end-of-the-year retrospective, join Tyler and I tonight on the Horror Pod Class. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the next year. Stay safe, stay weird.

“I turn my back on the haunted garden of superhuman suffering.”

December 22, 2020
reading materials
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The benighted year that is 2020 has given us a great many things, almost all of them bad. But it has also given us not one but two collections-in-translation from the “Belgian Poe” himself, Jean Ray (actually one of the numerous pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer) courtesy of translator Scott Nicolay, bringing the total of Nicolay’s translations of Ray’s work into English to four volumes, all available from Wakefield Press.

When writing about Cruise of Shadows, the second collection and, to this point, maybe the best, I said that Scott was doing the proverbial Lord’s work, and that remains true. In fact, enough can’t possibly be said about the translation job he does here, which goes far beyond translation and into the realm of annotation, providing extensive translator’s notes that fix historical precedent, explain unusual turns of phrase, and expound upon Ray’s many instances of wordplay and allusion.

The other thing that Scott does is to provide (also extensive) afterwords that help to fix the book in question not merely in history or in the timeline of Ray’s career, but as it relates to the specific field of weird fiction. As Scott rightly points out in the afterword of Circles of Dread, the latest translation and maybe my favorite to date, though we’ll get to that in a minute, the notion of weird fiction as a mode didn’t really exist yet at the time that Ray was writing.

Nevertheless, Scott identifies only two of the stories in Circles of Dread as being capital-W Weird, and, given that he’s the Ray scholar of the two of us, I’m certainly not going to argue with him. Ray’s undisputed masterpieces of the weird fiction mode are the two stories that anchored Cruise of Shadows, “The Gloomy Alley” and “The Mainz Psalter,” but some of his other tales, including “The Marlyweck Cemetery” in Circles of Dread, certainly deserve to rub shoulders with them.

But I said up above that this was maybe my favorite of the four Wakefield Press collections so far released, and that is because – regardless of the number of Weird tales contained herein or not – just about every story in Circles of Dread is a masterpiece of the gothic and macabre, and one that only Ray could have written.

Indeed, tales like “The Moustiers Plate” are so fanciful as to almost rub up against something like magical realism, while others, such as the inspiring “Hand of Gotz von Berlichingen” which opens the collection are nearly traditional ghost stories, but told in the always indirect way in which Ray specialized and which Scott calls “punching around corners” in his afterword.

Writing about Cruise of Shadows, I said that, “The majesty of Ray’s prose is in its ability to conjure – not a clear image of a thing, but a clear feeling of it.” That’s true here, as well, and while these stories (“Marlyweck Cemetery” notwithstanding) may be less Weird than those, they’re no less masterful, and I love a good ghost story, gothic tale, or supernatural yarn as much as any Weird fiction.

And these are about as good as they come.

“One can ask only so much of possessed alchemical objects.”

Measure Twice, Cut Twice

December 17, 2020
news, tabletop
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Those who have been following along with my adventures in quarantine may have noticed that I’ve gotten heavily back into tabletop gaming, at least conceptually. Shortly before the lockdown began, I dug into D&D 5e for the first time, and found that I really liked it.

Gaming is not a new thing for me. I’ve been playing – or, often more accurately, thinking about playing – almost for as long as I can remember. I’ve even worked in the field more than once, writing fiction and the occasional piece of gaming content for Privateer Press. As recently as November, I actually embarked on a large work-for-hire contract that I can’t reveal just yet, but it was tabletop gaming related.

As I’ve gotten more heavily back into that world, I have written a few times about the racism problems that are baked into these kinds of games and Tolkien-derived fantasy in general. I don’t have a good, simple fix for it. I don’t think there is a simple fix for it. And I know that it’s unrealistic to expect one fix to solve the problem, anyway. After all, the problem is much bigger than just fantasy.

Hopefully I make all that clear in my latest piece over at Unwinnable, where I take Wizards of the Coast (the makers of Dungeons & Dragons) to task for the inadequacy of their latest gesture in that direction, contained in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, their most recent supplement for 5e.

It is, as I say in the piece, absolutely better than nothing, but this problem deserves a response that’s better than that, and, as the producers of the biggest game in this corner of the market, we should hold Wizards to a higher standard.

I have never yet published a piece of gaming media over which I had much creative control. But when I work, in this field or any other, I try to exert what control I do have to reduce the amount of potentially harmful material that I inadvertently disseminate. And I’m always going to fall short. Which is why, each time, I try to do a little better.

So should we all.

“We can’t know what the future will hold.”

December 2, 2020
freelancing, fungus of terror, guignol, monsters from the vault, never bet the devil, news, on writing, painted monsters, privateer press, revenge of monsters from the vault, thoughts, year in review
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Now that it’s December, I think I can say with finality that 2020 will mark the first year since 2015 that I haven’t had a new book out with my name on the spine. It would be tempting to chalk this up to, y’know, 2020, and it’s certainly why there may not be one in 2021 either, but publishing is a slow business, and anything that was going to come out in this dark year would have already been in progress before the year began.

In actuality, there is no reason – either sinister or benign – for there not being a book this year, just as there is no real reason for their being a book each of those others. My first collection came out in 2012, the same year that I co-edited Fungi with Silvia Moreno-Garcia. My second, Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, was released by Word Horde in 2015. The following year saw the release of Monsters from the Vault, a collection of short essays I had written as part of a column about vintage horror cinema for Innsmouth Free Press.

In 2017, I released both my first and, thus far, only novel – a licensed work for Privateer Press – and a hardcover reprint of my first collection, with a couple of new stories and all-new illustrations by M.S. Corley. 2018 saw the release of my third collection, again from Word Horde, while in 2019 a follow-up to Monsters from the Vault hit shelves.

I have more than enough stories to complete another collection – probably a couple more – but the time is not yet right for any of them. The stories are there, but they do not all fit together. Eventually, those stories will find other stories and together they will form the collections they are meant to inhabit. Until that time, I keep churning.

The next book that’s likely to come out with my name on the cover is probably going to be Neon Reliquary, the short, occult cyberpunk novel that is currently being released in serial form at the Broken Eye Books Patreon. Some delays happened, and they are my fault, but the second installment should be up in the next month or two.

Several stories have already made their way out into the public in various places that are part of a “story cycle” based around Hollow Earths and similar pseudoscience. Once all of those have made their initial bows, the plan is to collect them – along with some original content – into a book, as well. Almost all of them are written and either published or pending publication – one has even made it into the Best Horror of the Year and been reprinted at Nightmare magazine – but various factors have delayed, well, everything, right?

I spent November working on a 40,000 word tabletop gaming-related work-for-hire project that I should be able to announce probably early next year. I had a few new stories published in 2020 that I’m quite proud of. More than in 2019, though not by much. “Prehistoric Animals” in the Weird Fiction Review, “The All-Night Horror Show” at The Dark magazine, “Manifest Destiny” in The Willows Anthology, which also reprinted some of my unfortunate juvenilia from a bygone age, “Screen Haunt” in It Came from the Multiplex, and “The Double-Goer” in Between Twilight and Dawn.

I’ve also sold several stories that have yet to see publication but should be out sometime next year. A Lucio Fulci sword-and-sorcery tribute in Beyond the Book of Eibon, “The Robot Apeman Waits for the Nightmare Blood to Stop” in Tales from OmniPark – both of which were funded via Kickstarter – and new stories in that Hollow Earth “story cycle” I mentioned that will be out in New Maps of Dream from PS Publishing and Tales from Arkham Sanitarium from Dark Regions Press. Plus some others that I can’t name just yet.

2020 has been 2020 for everyone. Someone on one of the Slacks that I’m on said that we are all a decade older than we were this time last year, which sounds about right. But so far I’m hanging in there, and I’m still banging out words on the regular, so expect to see more from me as we end this accursed year and start another, hopefully better one.

I hope you’re all hanging in there, too. Stay safe, stay weird.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Unpainted

November 8, 2020
tabletop, thoughts
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I recently discovered a kink in my brain. (Don’t worry, it’s not the sexy kind.) I’ve been into tabletop war games and miniature skirmish games for as long as I’ve known that they were a thing. Some of my earliest exposure to fantasy came, not through Lord of the Rings or Dungeons & Dragons, but diluted from them through Warhammer.

I’ve talked before about growing up poor, though, and when I was young I didn’t have the funds to really support a miniature gaming hobby (not that I didn’t try), so mostly I pored over source books and issues of White Dwarf, constructed army lists of miniatures I would never own, and dreamed.

I loved the models with their intricate paint jobs and I loved the dollhouse terrain. When I managed to scrape up the funds to acquire a model or two, I would try to paint them, because that’s what you were supposed to do. And, in the process, I would inevitably ruin them, because I hadn’t yet learned how to paint. That’s just part of the hobby, I gather, a stage everyone goes through.

Except that I never went through it. I hated painting, and because I hated it, I never practiced enough to learn the skillset needed to get better. For years, this, almost as much as a lack of adequate funds, curtailed my involvement in a hobby that I loved. Painting was so much a part of the field that if I was unwilling to do it, I was always going to be an outsider looking in, or so I thought.

Then I discovered that aforementioned kink in my brain. I was lucky enough to have a talented friend who actually enjoys painting minis and who was generous enough to paint my Hordes gatorman army for me – and they looked amazing. I was so happy. But it’s a laborious and time-consuming process, and he had his own models to paint, after all.

Then I got the Hellboy board game when it Kickstarted a few years back, and it came with just boatloads of minis. He and I were joking about him having to paint them all, and something clicked – while my brain instinctively told me that wargaming miniatures were supposed to be painted, it (equally instinctively) said that board game minis didn’t need to be.

This didn’t get a ton more interrogation until COVID struck and I began getting hardcore into dungeon crawl board games that I had denied myself previously. From there, it was a short and inevitable path to collecting some of the modern equivalents of those Warhammer miniatures I had spent so many hours daydreaming about as a youth.

And that’s where the click came. If the board game minis were allowed to sit in their boxes and drawers unpainted; if they still made me happy, just having them and pushing them around on tabletops and dungeon tiles, then why not the others, as well?

I found a sort of calm in assembling the push-fit models that came with Warhammer Underworlds and, from there, learned how to appreciate the act of gluing the more complicated kits together, even when that inevitably left me with glue all over my fingers.

But I still didn’t want to paint. And I didn’t have to. Nor did I have to push the obligation over onto Jay. In fact, there was no obligation. If the minis made me happy unpainted, then unpainted they could stay. I wasn’t somehow unworthy of them because I was fundamentally uninterested in an aspect of the hobby so central to the enjoyment of so many.

Lest I be misunderstood, this is not a rallying cry for the end of painting. For many – even most – of the people invested in the hobby, painting is a big part of the joy that it brings, as is fielding painted armies. And I love painted models. I love to see the work and care and personality that others have put into what is a genuine artform.

My good friend and sometime publisher Simon Berman runs the Brush Wielders Union, “a community of like-minded miniatures gamers dedicated to playing their games fully painted and supporting one another in their craft.” And that dedication and support are important and commendable and I love them for it.

Maybe someday, I’ll even discover that the bug has bitten me, and I will turn my attempts once more toward the brush and pigments. But if I never do, then I am not prohibited from the other joys that I derive from the hobby, and I can still bask in all my little idiot monsters and soldiers in their gray, plastic glory.