Missed most of the discussion on this...been offline for a while dealing with a new baby and a crazy work schedule. Unfortunately, the only thing that's given me the time to post is messing up my back badly enough to lay me out flat for a few weeks. Saw this thread and really wanted to jump in.
A while back I started pinging Clark on here with some PMs. The reason is that I noticed in one of the forum threads that the original masters for the
Legions of Steel/Planetstorm minis were still in existence, and owned by Marco. My intent was to try and cook up a deal with Clark/Marco where I would fund the cost of creating new moulds for the standard miniatures (Commando with Blaster,
G1 Nightmare and Mk I
Assault Fiend), and in return I would want access to several of the other masters to have new moulds made for some of the remaining miniatures I was still interested in that have become impossible to find.
My reasons for this (beyond the obvious of obtaining miniatures which can't be found) were somewhat altruistic: I'd like others to be able to get the miniatures and play the game. I think
LoS was (and is) a very good minis game. It may need some polish, but, at its core, it's a rock solid system. Coupled with that is the selfish (if a bit pie-in-the-sky) idea that more people playing means better chances of finding willing players.
During this process I realised that Clark also still had or had access to the original die for the LoS tiles. This got the gears turning in my head, as I have access to a die press. I have also scanned the unpunched tilesets, and I had been intending to take those scans into GIMP (an open-source Photoshop-type software) and colour correct the differing tilesets (Black Box/Blue Box/Template
Pack 1 are a different hue than Advanced Rules/Junction Point/Template Packs 2-5) so I could reprint them for myself. Suddenly, the idea of re-printing the Black Box game didn't seem so far-fetched.
Now, let me be clear: I am not so misty-eyed with nostalgia that I think a direct re-print of the game could be commercially successful! There have been massive changes in the boardgaming industry since Global Games folded, and the production values of modern boardgames (and miniature games, for that matter) have gone through the roof in the interim. However, if interest in the game could be re-kindled, then perhaps some sort of true re-launch could be feasible. This is where several seemingly unrelated but very interesting developments come in.
The first of these is Kickstarter. Now, this has already been discussed by several people in this very thread, and I don't want to get into it too deeply just yet, but, suffice it to say that this is an obvious vehicle for the relaunch of a game like this. There are a number of challenges involved with that, the first of which is that Kickstarter cannot operate in Canada, where I believe Clark is located. Another potential problem is simply the question of how munch brand recognition LoS still carries; successful Kickstarter campaigns rely on reputation (at some level) for their success (Ogre still had a dedicated following; Sedition Wars had McVey's name which is well know in the miniatures industry; Reaper is an existing, successful company). Finally, a campaign that looks for all of its capital (e.g. has no seed money) from the Kickstater itself appears far riskier than one that simply wants money to pretty itself up. That perceived risk (whether due to reputation or lack of financial backing) heavily affects peoples' decisions to back Kickstarter campaigns.
This segues nicely into the failed Kickstarter for Vor: the Maelstrom 2.0: the original Vor was another tabletop miniatures wargame, from the now defunct FASA Corporation, and it was aimed directly at GW's blackened corporate heart. It was also a better game (mechanically speaking) than 40k (once again, my opinion, but also shared by an awful lot of people familiar with both). The original creator of Vor (Mike "Skuzzy" Nielsen, coincidentally a Canadian like Clark), who still held the rights to it, opened his own website and slowly gathered the remains of the hardcore Vor fanbase around him. After a year or more of ongoing discussions, he announced that he would be running a Kickstarter to fund the production of Vor 2.0, and there was much rejoicing! What this meant was that he would write the new Vor 2.0 Rulebook, and possibly stretch that into the various Forcebooks. All he needed was $25,000 for cool new art (there are still miniatures in production for the game from IronWind Metals). Let me run that by you again: he wanted $25,000 for a new rulebook for which noone had seen a manuscript, and he had no previous Kickstarter (or other) successes. Needless to say, the campaign flopped. Now, I'm not saying that $25,000 was necessarily too much money for all the art needed in a new book of the scope proposed; I haven't priced out artwork like that, and have really no idea. The problem was that Mike had no current reputation for success on a project like this, had nothing showing what work had been done thus far, and in the end was relying entirely on the nostalgia of gamers that already knew the original game. As an aside, he also badly mismanaged his website, with many people reporting problems joining and posting, along with dropping off for long periods of time. The site has now been nothing but an "under construction" landing page for more than a couple years, and I've seen even the most diehard fans admit on other sites that the game is well and truly dead. This is an object lesson on what not to do for Legions of Steel. Remember: if you can't be a good example, you can always be a terrible warning!
The next seemingly unrelated event was the release of Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster via Kickstarter. For those of you who don't know what a quick Google can tell you, SW:BforA is a game in the mould of Space Hulk or Legions of Steel, with two assymetric forces battling it out through various missions in a sci-fi dungeon. The Kickstarter was hugely successful, in no small part due to Mike McVey being attached to (and championing) the project as a sculptor. As it turns out, the game itself kinda sucks (my opinion, but increasingly shared by others), but boy! Are those minis cool, or what? Regardless, I believe that the success of this Kickstarter shows that there is still a strong desire amongst boardgamers for something that scratches a Space Hulk kind of an itch. Games like Incursion and Earth Reborn are attempting to capitalize on that.
Number three (or is it four, counting Vor?) of my list of unrelateds happened while I was spending a few minutes in a bookstore, trying to kill some time. I walked through the gaming
section (read: past the single gaming shelf) thinking I'd conduct a little research on which RPGs actually get sold in big chain bookstores these days. What instead caught my eye was a beautiful little hardcover, gorgeously produced, titled Tomorrow's War. Once again, for those that can't work a search engine, it's a tabletop miniatures wargame. I browsed through the book for five or so minutes before deciding to head straight for the cash register with it in hand. This is the first gaming impulse buy I have made in a very, very long time. The proliferation of online information sources now means that it's never actually necessary to buy any game without knowing pretty much everything there is to know about it in advance. In this case it was quite lucky for Osprey books that their graphic design worked; online reviews (read after I got it home) that turned up when I decided to see if there was much of a player base tear the book to shreds. Some of that is well-deserved, as the rulebook does a terrible job of presenting the rules - had I read the reviews first, I wouldn't have bought it - but underneath the mess is a very good game. The point to this particular rambling anecdote is twofold: first, graphic presentation is crucial, and some of that means adapting to the different (from when LoS was released) aesthetics of the day, as that can make all the difference between a purchase and an indifferent shrug; second, making sure there's nothing as silly as rampant typos, a missing index, or poorly laid-out rules helps minimize the odds of scathing reviews that kill the game's chances before it can get a toehold. What does all this have to do with Legions of Steel? Tomorrow's War bears more than a passing similarity to Stargrunt II, a more than 15 year-old game.
The last two things I'm going to string together, as they both have to do with production of miniatures. One was already mentioned in another thread (
see here), and that's a new plastic that can be spin-cast, and apparently with some pretty funky undercuts (the significance of which is too complicated to explain in detail).
Here's the background: metal miniatures for gaming are made by various casting processes, mostly spin-casting. The advantage to spin-casting and metal miniatures are that the startup costs are very small (in the hundreds of dollars per miniature). The major disadvantages are that production is much slower, vastly more expensive per part (the larger the production run the worse this gets), and cannot hold as much detail on the miniature. Plastic miniatures, on the other hand, are typically moulded in some type of runner mould. The advantages here are many: speed of production (once the mould runs), amount of detail possible on the model, ease of assembly, and ridiculously low cost per part (that only gets better the higher the production run). The disadvantage is mostly about one thing: the capital outlay to build and run the mould are enourmous in comparison, as much as a couple orders of magnitude higher. Being able to do this could allow new, improved plastic miniatures to be made for the game without the massive capital requirement that plastic moulds normally require. Similarly, a recent announcement that Mutant Chronicles has been picked up and a new Kickstarter launched revealed that they are using very new versions of rapid prototyping machines to create the miniatures (unless the Kickstarter raises enough funds for plastic molds to be made). Previously this wasn't feasible, as the plastic 3D prototyping machines that were affordable (you could get a Dimension model the size of a stove that would sit in your office for $30,000 even 8 years ago) couldn't produce the detail required for 25mm figures. They were basically 3-axis hot glue guns, and prototypes had a ridged appearance, as they were built in layers (which is what all rapid prototyping does). The images shown of the early miniature builds for Mutant Chronicles show none of this, and look amazing for prototyped components. If this is on the level, it's a watershed moment for 3D printing, and potentially opens up another avenue for getting the (new) miniatures into production.
Okay, this post has turned into a novel, so I'll string all this together and lay out where I'm going in another post later.