Command Combat: Colonials is Coming!

Craig Robertson is premiering Command Combat: Colonials at Celesticon this weekend, and it should be fantastic.  In it, we go into the colonial wars as Britain expanded into various continents.  Here is the information on the flyers:

We are proud to announce a new addition to the Command Combat series. Command Combat: Colonial Wars will expand the Command Combat miniature rules system to include the multitude of small wars and punitive expeditions that European colonial powers engaged in from 1815 to 1914. From China to Afghanistan, from the Sudan to South Africa, from Paraguay to Montana, Command Combat: Colonial Wars will allow you to play your favorite battles and armies from this incredibly rich period of history.

Command Combat: Colonial Wars will add the following features to the Command Combat system:

·         Detailed historical scenarios.
·         Full point-build army lists for a wide variety of colonial conflicts.
·         Nationality-specific special rules for units and commanders.
·         A new campaign system to simulate an expedition from start to finish.

The first wave of Command Combat: Colonial Wars will cover the years 1873 through 1885. The British were incredibly busy during these years, with campaigns against the Ashantis, Zulus, Afghan tribes, Mahdists, Egyptian Army, and the Boers. Meanwhile, there was a certain blond-haired U.S. Army officer who got himself into a bit of trouble in Montana. Watch for The Transvaal War Campaign Pack early next year, and keep an eye out for playtest sessions at your local game stores and conventions until then.

Serials or Short Stories?

It’s no secret the Relic Worlds has its inspiration in the movies I grew up with, Indiana Jones and Star Wars, as well as a smattering of others of the time, like Buck Rogers and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  These, in turn, have their basis in serialized movies and books of earlier ages; the 50s, the 30s, and even before that.  The days of radio were huge on serialized stories, episodes only a few minutes long that took characters part way through an ongoing story to the next cliff-hanger.

Serialized stories have their roots in the 19th century, appearing first as the penny dreadful serials in England.  They were also called penny awful, penny blood, penny number, and penny horrible.  They were called penny because that’s how much they cost.  Each had a part of the story which was released that week, and you had to wait until the next week to get the next part.  They were printed on cheap pulp paper, which later gave them the name “pulp fiction.”

The difference between these and short stories, of course, is that serials continue ongoing stories and character arcs.  Storylines don’t pay off within the confines of the story, but may go throughout an entire season of episodes.

This is the dilemma I have had with creating Relic Worlds; whether to follow a serial or short stories.  The intent of the short stories is to introduce new readers to the storyline without charging them any money.  This works better in an episodic as people can jump in at any time and get a sense of what’s going on.  But a serial will continue complex and interesting story elements both for the characters and for the mystery at large.  As such, the compromise I came to was to provide individual short stories with ongoing elements that appear in all the short stories.  You put them all together, and they create storylines and mysteries that get solved and paid off throughout the various stories.  There are a few stories that go for several episodes, but I’m keeping them short so people can see the where the beginnings and ends are to go through them with ease.

Bandwagon Network in Progress

Last year I started making some battle reports of my own game, Command Combat: Civil War, to spread word of the game and hopefully build interest.  Unfortunately, no one watched because no one knew the game.  I figured I'd do a video of a game they do like, Flames of War.  I figured this would bring people to the channel, then they'd watch more about my own game.  This didn't really work in that they didn't come and switch over to my game, but tons of people watched our Flames of War videos.  In fact, Battlefront, which makes Flames of War, placed our videos on their site and we started getting thousands of hits.

I also saw how a lot of videos based on computer games were getting a lot of hits, so I did those.  My girlfriend and I got to having so much fun doing these things that we branched out into several other videos, until it became unclear what our channel was about.  Some who had come to look at Civil War stuff were particularly confused.

And so we're making a new channel called Bandwagon which will include everything from the battle reports to the video games to a review show to board games to history lessons to ways to build and paint miniatures.  We've taped almost everything, and it goes live at the beginning of October.