Return to Bretonnia, or Rekindling Old Flames?

IMG_1229Last Wednesday we started a campaign that I would have never dreamed that would actually happen – we’ll return to the world of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying game. Once upon a time at 2006 we started a campaign using the second edition of the said rpg and from that gaming group grew our current community of almost 50 active members.

The GM for this new campaign will be one of the players of that original group; Santtu has been planing for this campaign for almost all of this time and I’ve been eagerly waiting for it. I think that the character I created last week might actually be third one created for this particular game. Not to hex it or anything but we are supposed to get the game going on this Friday.

Why should this all be of any interest to others? As it turns out getting together with “old love” might be as problematic in roleplaying games than in real life.

As the host of the Daily Empire and the writer of quite a few fan supplements I can pretty much say I’m something of a Warhammer fanboy. Over the years I have accumulated quite a deep knowledge of the Old World and fell in love with its quirkiness. This does not have to be a bad thing but it got us in serious trouble.

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In case you are wondering – “Sininen” on the beer can stands for “blue” not “knight” (that would be “ritari”).

Santtu (the GM) asked us to write a short backstory for our characters. There was some confusion about a few details and we ended up having a heated argument on a really small matter. In all the confusion that followed I still managed to be extremely entertained. It is one thing to argue about how to interpret an obscure rule and argue about the fluff of the gaming world with someone who is clearly as passionate about the game as myself.

Much of our disagreement (if it can be called that) was probably due my small amount of experience as a player. I’ve GMed in the Old World on and off for about seven years altogether and must have a definite handle of my version about it. It is almost twenty years since I last acted as a player in it (excluding a oneshot in Ropecon a few years back). So I know I must take this as an opportunity to refine my gaming skills while at the same time come into terms that my Old World is not the only real Old World. In addition to this realisation Santtu was first to agree that he too must be willing to “kill his darlings” as a GM.

We might have started this campaign a different way. I might have understood what Santtu was going after and might have followed his doctrine and all might have been fun and games. But I still think this argument could turn out to be the best thing for this campaign. It happened even before an actual gaming session and might have well ended up devastating the anticipation and enjoyment for this game. But I think we managed to dodge that bullet.

In essence we managed to clear out the air and discuss (kinda) about what we want for this campaign. It also showed that we are both really passionate for this campaign and we both want to see it work out. It certainly might have been better if we would have sat down and actually discussed about it rather than have an flamewar on our forum. But it could also have happened during a gaming session. And I think that it would have been much bigger problem then.

Now I’m more eager than ever to start this campaign and see what comes out of it! Hopefully this will be The Campaign we will be discussing for years to come.

As an end note I must add there ARE two other players in the game too. They just aren’t as involved or dedicated for Warhammer than Santtu and me.

And if you want to know we actually managed to get into the argument because I did not feel like my knight should be serving as a lowly squire in Bretonnia where such things (apparently) are not even likely to exist. More on that on this post at the Daily Empire.

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