Ancient Tales of Faraway Lands

I love stories. Whether as audience or author, they are a consistent source of connection and understanding. My favourite way to tell stories is together with friends at the gaming table, stories of adventure and heroism and conflict and loss. Stories that make us laugh and cry and think. This story, however, is mine, or at least part of it, and I’m going to start at the end of the beginning. 

The 1993 Autumn/Winter Argos Catalogue, and one particular page in the toys and games section, pictured above for your convenience, where Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets sat nestled amongst the board games. This image has been seared in my brain for over thirty years, not just because I bought that Warhammer box from Argos, but because that’s where my love of both wargames and roleplaying games started. They belong together, as far as I’m concerned, two sides of the same cool fantasy game coin. Both ways to tell stories.

There’s a certain pathway to becoming a tabletop gamer that almost every British nerd of my vintage seems to have followed. I’m one of the so-called “xennials”, a micro-generation that has been identified as those whose analogue childhood became a digital adolescence. More importantly for our purposes, we’re loosely defined as folks who were born during the original cinematic run of the Star Wars trilogy. It meant that we grew up during a time when fantasy and sci-fi were hot shit, and we were bombarded with it.