KAMPING KITBASH Part Two

Part one is here.

DAY TWO: MAKING SOME MORE TOY SOLDIERS

The pressures on my time were minimal. I had to run my own class on Sunday at 11, but aside from that, I had only made it into one of the workshops that I applied for - a mask-making affair, also on Sunday, which sounded like a laugh.

Day two rolled around and I stepped out into the thin Belgian dawn to witness the characteristically bleak picture of a low-grade hotel buffet breakfast. “Wouldn’t catch me there,” I think. “I’ve got better sense than that. I can track down all the local delicacies.”

Reader: I could not. I managed to purchase the only unfilled gozleme I’ve ever seen without intending to, and I paid five quid for a double espresso in a train station, before sitting on a bench behind a bronze statue dedicated to the unknown women war dead while the sky clouded over and begrudgingly consuming both then choking down an unfiltered cigarette.

A BRIEF ASIDE CONCERNING: THE BROOM

I have a thing I do at conventions. You know how, when one travels, one’s innards can be thrown intro disarray? Jet lag. Unfamiliar food. Late nights. Too much booze. Skipped meals. Not enough vegetables. It can leave a fellow bunged up, let’s say, with regards to the regular function of his digestive system. I put up with this for half a decade before I discovered The Broom.

It’s easy: after breakfast, you knock back at least two shots of black coffee and smoke an unfiltered cigarette. (I doubt the unfiltered nature has much of an impact, but that’s how I smoke ‘em, and I need all the coolness I can get considering what’s coming next.) By the time you’re three-quarters of the way through the cigarette, you know what’s what. You can feel things resolving themselves gutwise. It’s called The Broom because it just sort of... sweeps everything through. 

Oh! I cannot stress this enough: PERFORM THE BROOM AT YOUR HOTEL. A crucial feature of The Broom is a fifteen minute window of extreme privacy once you stub out the smoked section of the procedure. You do not want to Commit to The Broom, as I accidentally did on Thursday morning, directly before you enter security at Manchester Airport Terminal 2. 

Anyway. That’s why I’m so bright and breezy at cons. I’m fully empty. And I’ve not shit myself even once off it.

BACK TO DAY TWO

Suitably divested of yesterday’s earthly concerns, I trotted into the mansion once more and put down a coat of black spray paint on my dino-riders. Daan, who was clearly hoping that he could operate on the sleep he had the previous week alone, helped me out by doing a zenithal highlight on them with white - this is a fun trick that gamers learnt about ten years ago where you exaggerate the pattern of light on a miniature by blasting it with white spray from above, meaning that a lot of the work of shading is done before you even start picking out colours.

(“How do you do it?” I asked.

“You hold it above them and spray.”
“Makes sense. Like this?” I gingerly depress the button and six big droplets of white splat out onto the miniatures.
“Nah.”

“Oh, okay, I - like this?” I do the exact same thing again.

“Let me show you.” He takes the spray can off me and does it perfectly.)

While they were drying, I made another model; a Harlequin, one of the weirder kinds of aforementioned space elves who dress up like clowns and murder people using monofilament wire. Vae Victus miniatures had very kindly donated about eight hundred individual figurines to the event, some of which had some very fancy trousers and jangly hats on, so I grabbed three of them, cut them up, and started suturing them together with wire. Here’s as far as I got:

While I tinkered away on Tall Elf, I caught sight of the workshop that was happening outside; a woman with long red hair was leading a discussion on the nature of creativity. It all sounded quite... spiritual, philosophical, earnest even, in the sort of way that makes me apprehensive. I’ve spent the last thirty years trying to distance myself from ever expressing vulnerability in public if I can help it - someone might actually see what I’m like and we can’t have that - and a lot of the workshops at the previous event were quite soft-focus too, if you know what I mean.

First thing we did, in Enschede (after the inaugural Office LARP in which turned up late, I mis-read every social cue and immediately threatened one of the organisers in-character as an insidious robot whilst we were standing four inches apart in a broom closet) was sit down on the floor and fondle a collection of small stones presented to us by a gaggle of four art students wearing the sort of gentle post-apocalyptic barbarian costumes you’d expect to see in a Eurovision stage show from a country that places 12th.

Then we picked out the stone that spoke to us, and spent an hour attempting to crochet a holster for it. It was a load of old toss, if I’m honest, but I still have the stone and its slapdash yarn holster, so surely it wasn’t entirely a waste of time.

The mask-making workshop that I would attend was similarly spiritual, with a section at the top where we closed our eyes and focused on an imaginary world where the masks were made. The “make sculpting tools out of natural materials” class featured a crowd of nerds shuffling around in the bushes and trying to find bits of organic cruft that resonated with them.

I don’t think of the work in that way. I understand the benefit of a magic circle as much as the next man - probably more than the next man, if we’re honest - and I appreciate that rite, ritual and sanctification are all useful tools to guide, focus and bring your group together into a receptive and explorative state. And they help connect us to a broader sense of consciousness, and underline the fact that art cannot be made without reference and influence to its context, and and and. But, the bitter part of me, the sneering two-pints-in anti-intellectual entrenched bloke who squats Slavic at the back of my brain, wants to write it all off.

(And? Privately, here, in this piece? I think that it cheapens the whole process. It ties it to something ephemeral and magical. We did it. Us, the blood and bones, the fear and fury, the wet bags of electric meat. The act of creation is beautiful and joyous enough without ascribing it mystical significance.)

Anyway. I pause work on the Harlequin, requiring better light than the shadowy kitbash room would provide to do the sculpting I needed to make it look half-decent, and slap some paint on those dinos. In addition to zenithal highlights, the other innovation over the last decade within the miniatures paint industry has been Contrast or Speed paints: effectively, incredibly high-pigment glazes that cling to and stain the miniature, collecting in the recesses and handling a lot of the work of shading and highlighting with a single coat. I would like to thank Army Painter, and their Speed Paint, for enabling me to dash out a colour scheme so quickly on these scaly little guys.

Dinner was chili sin carne. I sat down next to an Austrian Scout Leader and a couple of Brits, and we chatted about our time in youth organisations, and I neglected to mention the fact that I left the scouts maybe two months after joining it because a) it seemed like hard work b) people kept telling me what to do c) the other boys would quite often strike and harangue me and d) I didn’t enjoy camping and, delicate hothouse flower that I was, became intolerably homesick when more than twenty minutes away from my house. As far as they know, I can sheepshank and dib-dib-dib with the best of ‘em.

Yer man, it would turn out, had run Honey Heist for a number of tween scouts only last month. A surprising number of people found me and said that Honey Heist, or the Witch is Dead, or one of my other older games was their first foray into indie roleplaying and it started them down a path of discovery. 

I was dead happy about that. That’s what I want to happen. I talk to folk so often and they sound distressed at the amount of work and thinking required to take part in RPGs, about how it all works, and it’s not that complicated. You’re just telling a story. You can do that. We can all do that. I’m glad that the lo-fi approach has allowed people to take part, and I’ve seen a similar thing in the great success of Mothership’s third-party program: when every adventure looks like a photocopied zine, everyone can make one. And when everyone makes something, odds are a percentage of that stuff is going to be pretty good.

In fact: last year, the group that got furthest with their game during the session designed Bleeding Zeal, a game about doomed cultists on a pilgrimage, and this year they presented me with a finished, printed copy. What a lovely thing.

Some folks went out drinking that night; others stayed in, played roleplaying games and listened to a storyteller with a guitar. I hid in my hotel room and was asleep by half ten.

DAY THREE: NOT MAKING TOY SOLDIERS

Day three was my time to shine. I was getting revved up about the workshop. I had an inkling it was going to be pretty special. Plus: it was my thirty-ninth birthday, and I had a badge on which said “IT’S MY BIRTHDAY” in case anyone didn’t know.

Chastened by yesterday’s efforts, I shelled out ten quid for the desolate Ibis Budget breakfast buffer and ate as much ham and as many soft-boiled eggs as I could manage before stepping outside into the morning’s half-light to Commit to the Broom before walking to the mansion again.

I realise now that I did not take any pictures of the tiles, which I regret given that I am trying to illustrate an article about them. Daan was snapping some shots, which I presume will become available to me in due course; I found this picture on Nacroleptic_Wizard’s Instagram which shows a small selection, as you can see:

Narcoleptic_Wizard, it turns out, is a friendly young chap called Jack who wrote Aetherpunk - a wizard-based wargame that I read and enjoyed a year or so ago. I made this horrible little fucker for it:

We divided up the tiles into individual groups and sorted those groups into five boxes - four with two groups each, and one which contained all of the BITS tiles because I felt that represented the broadest and least categorisable thing. Folks shuffled in and sat down, and I encouraged them to make groups of any size they liked; normally I limit group size to four and try not to let people make things on their own, because it lacks some of the creative spark you get from collaboration, but I let that slide this time.

I wrote out the categories of things on the board and, after briefly explaining what function they served, told people to go hog wild with it. Take a rummage and find some things you like. Combine them in an interesting way. Have fun. I’ll be here if you need anything, and I’ll come around and poke my nose in every fifteen minutes or so to see how things are going, but most of what’s going on here is you finding the connections between these disparate things I wrote.

Let’s take a look at each individual game that the groups made; bear in mind that, aside from the last two, none of these were “finished” games in any sense of the word, but broad sketches that could be developed out into something more robust after the gig:

IS IT WRONG TO RUIN PROM BY TRANSFORMING INTO AN IMMORTAL UNDEAD MONSTROSITY?

A lot of the games were inspired by the Characters and Goals tiles, which was my intent, and this was a good example of that. Players are normal high-school girls who are actually nightmare undead entities in disguise, and they want to destroy the world by triggering the most potential heartbreak at their upcoming summer dance. 

One of the things I noticed is that a lot of the groups veered towards very particular implementations of mechanics, rather than applying them in a broader sense. Instead of having a core mechanic (i.e. add your stat to a D6 and score 6 or more to succeed, apply as needed) they broke down a session into individual mechanical beats and proscribed the rules for them. (IS IT WRONG had different mechanical beats for finding a date, finding an outfit, and performing well at prom.) With this you end up with a more proscribed experience, equivalent to roll-and-write games or Olly Darkshire’s solo games (Trapped In A Cabin With Lord Byron is a good example). 

It wasn’t my goal to have them make games in this way, and I think that I could avoid it in future by underlining the usual function of a core mechanic more strongly, but I’m glad the groups had fun and made something they felt confident and excited with. I think, also, that wargames - which use very specific rules for very specific circumstances - were the main inspiration for most of the people in the room, so I can see some common DNA there.

CYBERPUNK OPERA.

One of the Character tiles says CYBERPUNK OPERATORS, and this two-man team decided to remove the “TORS” from that and use it as CYBERPUNK OPERA instead. Players are in the audience of a VR cyberpunk opera, but their meat bodies were murdered in the real world during the first act. They only have until the end of the performance to solve their own murders because, once the fat lady sings, the instance will be closed and their consciousnesses will fade from existence. These lads seemed to have a good grasp on what made a functional game, both in terms of sell and rules; this could definitely become something functional with a little work.

SUNKEN WIZARD SCHOOL.

After returning from your summer break, you attempt to go to your new office in Warlock Academy only to find that it’s been entirely swallowed by a vast and shadowed necropolis. It’s up to you, and your disposable post-graduate research students, to infiltrate the labyrinth and find out what happened to your place of work via the timely application of magic so powerful it can turn your (or: a student’s) brain inside out. The group of three seemed keen to stick with their initial draw of tiles, and it was a great idea for a game, but they struggled to make their resolution mechanic - a deck of playing cards - work for the pace of game they wanted. 

I explained to them how almost every game that uses a playing card resolution system ends up either being tremendously simple (see: Unbound and Royal Blood, my two card-based titles) or is complex to the point of interrupting the flow of narrative, and participants tend to play a card game and THEN play a roleplaying game about the card game, which isn’t great.

(A good example of a card game that’s relatively complex but still tells stories well is Sean Smith's Exuviae, which uses Solitaire to create a conspiracy of insect-people corrupting a seaside town.) 

After pivoting to a 2D6 Apocalypse World style system, they moved it to a solo game and had the playing cards instead represent your available remaining students, which is great; the suit and number reflected each student’s speciality and whether they were underskilled or overconfident with their magic.

TOOTH VAMPIRES.

This group drew two of each tile and fuckin stuck with it. They ended up with a strange game where the player characters were scrappy, grotty vampires and the main antagonists were orcs; orcs had bigger teeth, and in this culture tooth size was the ultimate indicator of status, so orcs were in charge. I admire them for sticking to the random draw, and it generated an interesting core mechanic: players had different sizes of dice representing different bodily systems (muscle, bone, senses, nerves, etc) and they would grab two of them for each challenge. The GM then had to guess what dice they’d chosen, and if they guessed right, it went badly for them; I feel like it would underline the tension of being an underclass, your every move scrutinised and criticised by those above you.

GOBBLIN FOR LOVE.

Goblin dating app game. Very prescriptive, as described above; it was a solo game intended to generate a lovesick goblin and around three potential suitors. Would your goblin find love? (The name was from an earlier draft of the game, which was raunchier; I can’t remember the final title.) Roll some D4s and find out. I suggested that it might be nice to factor it as a performative thing; an artist could use it for inspiration, draw their goblins on their social media, and play through the dates so their audience can watch along. The tight scope meant that the single designer finished their game within the workshop, and in fact played a quick round of it with a nearby artist. So that’s nice.

OUTRAGEOUSLY ROWDY CHEERLEADERS. This was the largest group, but one of the other micro-celebrities - name of Terran - took charge and kept things moving. I believe they taught the games design session the year before I did, and that experience helped to coordinate and unite the group into building a functional prototype by the end of the two hour period. This group also seemed to be happy to experiment with new tiles, throw out old ones that weren’t working, and in general treat it more like a traditional kitbash than a challenge to be overcome or a set of tight parameters to inspire creativity.

Again: I could explain that better, that you’re supposed to treat this like a buffet and not an iron chef contest, but people certainly had fun with it, and I think that we got some weirder games as a result. And, death of the author, right?

This group picked MUSCULAR ORCS and THE COLLEGE OF BARDS as their two character tiles - I wasn’t intending that people use more than one to define their protagonists, but quite a few groups did - and promptly decided that their game was about big muscular orcish cheerleaders whipping up the crowd into a frenzy so their team would win. 

They also found the “dice stacking” mechanic tile, and figured that it would provide a fun connection to a human pyramid of cheerleaders, so they built a dexterity-based game where players had a handful of stats - MUSCLE, MYSTICALITY and MOXIE, which I stole from Kingdom of Loathing - and used those to effect how many dice they had to stack and where. Once the stack reached 12, the CROWDNESS LOUDNESS meter capped out, and their team won. If the dice stack collapsed, the game was over, and it was all pretty fast and furious, so games would resolve themselves within about five minutes. 

It wasn’t a roleplaying game, per se; people didn’t really act as their individual characters, and instead worked together to stack dice with the theme overlaid on top. It was a dice game. BUT that theme was also woven through the mechanics, right down to the way that one of the events that could happen was that all the players had to pound the table with their fists like orcs and risk the dice stack collapsing. It had really clear stakes, and the wrapper was brilliant, and playing it meant that the group were all invested and oohing and aahing over every tense move. 

And! You can download and play it here.

HELL YES

So, in short: good. Tremendous.

Someone said that I’d kind of made a game in which you design a game, which is sort of true: there’s a playful element to it, and by providing a set of parameters to operate within you get past the initial awkward stage of blank paper and even blanker stares. I’m really proud of what Chosen By Goblins and I made together, and I’m told they intend to bring me back and run it again if only to justify the cost of printing the cards in man-hours. 

One of my favourite things about kitbashing is that there are very few rules. We like it if you base the miniature; we expect the paint to be dry. That’s about it. You can mangle whatever you like into a semicoherent whole and we’ll find something to love about it: whether that’s an interesting combination of materials, a fun take on existing lore, neat composition, a clever paint-job, etc etc. You’ve got pretty much free reign to do whatever weird shit you fancy.

The weird shit that I like to do most is replacing heads with things that aren’t supposed to be heads. You’ll be surprised, once you immerse yourself into either “weird grimy sci-fi” or “weird grimy fantasy,” just how many things can serve as a head. I’ve used backpacks. I’ve used backs. Speakers. Shields. Little robot scarabs. BIG robot scarabs. Enormous clenched fists. Trees. Mines. Little bells.

BIG bells!

Iron Maidens!

The top half of a walking tank!

Part of the joy of kitbashing is seeing a thing that someone designed to be one thing and imagining it as another, rotating and combining it with other things until it hangs together. You can’t imagine everything that will happen with your creations.

And I think the thing that surprised me most about the design workshop was the way that people kept doing it wrong and it still worked.

When I say “doing it wrong,” I mean “wrong” by my very limited scope and the way that I intended it to be used; as I’ve mentioned throughout, I had some ideas about how the tiles would work. I had imagined one Character Card, one Goal, five Abilities, one set of Stats, maybe two Mechanics, etc, etc. Some by-the-numbers stuff. I don’t think anyone did that - there was too much on offer, too many ideas to cut them down - and I’m really happy about that. Of course they did it differently and it still worked. I’d built a sandbox. People kept replacing the heads with things that weren’t heads.

The group that won best game didn't even make a roleplaying game, for heaven's sake.

I have attached the full list of tiles to this blog - essay? Diatribe? Fugue state experience purge? - and I encourage you to take a look at ‘em. You won’t get the full experience with the boxes and, you know, the twenty-something Belgians, but you could probably get a handle on what’s on offer.

BIRTHDAY BOY

I’ve done my fair share of thinking about gender, and I’m happy enough with the Man I’ve ended up at, but if I had to pick a specific one that resonated with me it’d be the specialist Birthday Boy which I get to experience once a year. I enjoy the way that rules are relaxed on your birthday, and how you get to have nice things, and usually it means I eat chips of some kind so that’s something to look forward to. 

After mentioning that I would turn 39 at the event to Tine, I was surprised at lunch after my workshop with a chocolate birthday cake covered in candles that spelled out “HAPPY BIRTHDAY.” It was a good cake! I cut it into as many pieces as I could manage and handed it out around the participants. 

Beautiful stuff.

SPACE GITS

After lunch, we had the mask workshop as described and pictured above, and the rest of the event was left open for people to mess about with their toy soldiers and play games. I was plum tuckered out after the exertions of the weekend - and, I confess, I had been fighting off a migraine with handfuls of Sumatriptan and Ibuprofen since I woke up - so I decided to take it easy.

I watched some chaps playing Mike Hutchinson’s new SPACE GITS game and nursed a beer. SPACE GITS is a charming, anarchic sort of thing: you play three pissed-up orcs each, who stumble all over the battlefield in search of valuable loot in the form of bottle caps. 

When you want to move a model, you throw dice onto the playing area and can only move directly towards them as many inches as you rolled. When you injure someone’s orc, you give them D6s, which they must stack atop one another in base contact with the miniature; when it moves, it must move with them, and if it collapses at any point the orc falls over and must be rescued by their mates (or viciously mugged by their enemies). 

The game runs for at least thirty minutes, and then after that there’s a random roll at the start of each player’s turn that can trigger the arrival of the police which means everyone runs away. All in all, it’s big on daft and low on strategy, and has lots of neat physical dexterity challenges, and is, you know, fun. Fun to play. Fun in and of itself. I really admire that in a game, and it’s something I rarely manage to achieve.

And then: awards, where all seventy-five of us gathered on the sloped lawn at the back of the mansion and the organisers handed out prizes to people who they reckoned did especially good jobs. For reasons that were never explained, the unofficial theme tune for the weekend - which played at the start of the ceremony - was Vulfmon & Zachary Barker’s Disco Snails.

I can’t say I like it. But I certainly can’t stop listening to it.

And I like the way they rhyme “roof” with “groove.”

And then: chips for dinner from a van out front of the mansion, and goodbyes, and the earliest night I could manage, and - as is tradition - handfuls peanuts eaten in bed whilst not wearing trousers. No wild inspiration struck me this time. I think I was just happy. 

IN CLOSING

If you’re interested in trying out the workshop yourself, please get in touch and we’ll chat about it because that sounds great and also I’m interested in what you choose to do to make the tiles.

On our side, we’re interested in exploring the idea a bit and seeing if there’s a product there that we could, you know, sell for money that we can spend on food and shoes and mortgages rather than one which exists in shoebox somewhere in Belgium.

What did you think of this new format, where I write at great length about something that interests me? Is it working for you? Is there anything else you’d like to see me take a turn at? Let me know as we crest this strange new horizon together.

Love and fury,

- Grant