Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Thunru'u. Thomar the Wizard had one as his butler, and when we asked hom to pack us a picnic lunch for the assault on the palace of Bassa, the chap packed us an assortment of eyespoons as well as the food and drink. He - I think it was a 'he' - spoke with a bit of lisp, which I put down to his having a beak instead of lips; we had a hell of a time keeping a straight face, as Phil voicing the character sounded waaay too much like Daffy Duck.

In typical butler form, the worthy gent was scandalized that we didn't have a good set of sterling silver eyespoons, and we got a crash course on how to use them and keep them polished. I think Eyloa still has them.

Oh Blessed Karakan, I'd forgotten about the sterling silver eyespoons.

You know, to a young whelp raised on Warner Brothers, Bored of the Rings, and Monty Python, it sometimes seemed like Phil had no sense of humor.

That just ain't so; it was just a lot less Chuck Jones and more Oscar Wilde. We thought the eyespoons were about the funniest thing we'd ever heard of.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

There: I think we're all caught up. I'm off the shop in the basement; I've got Barsoomian flyers on the work table; these are also useful for Tekumelyani aircars, too. Only one radium cannon in stock (vintage Heritage USA), so I'll have to make a magnetic mounting for it so it can move between flyers as needed...

You know, I used to dread "What has Chrine been building NOW?" when you were on the other side of the table.

Or there was poor Tom Thompson who seemed to consistently guess WRONG with his "wonder weapons." Remember the LXXXIII Chinese War Rocket Artillery Battalion?

For those not familiar with Chinese war rockets, their aiming was, shall we say, somewhat approximate.

Originally Posted by David Johansen

Actually, you know, you might be able to answer a question I've had for a very long time. What happened to Heritage Miniatures?

I used to have some of their plastic fantasy miniatures sets and have always regretted not picking up more of them.

I know Reaper got the moulds in the late eighties or early nineties.

Well, I can try; the lift tanks on the flyers just got glued onto the decks, and I have to wait before I can get going again.

Let's see. My perspective is that of somebody who saw them at conventions and bought their products in the Tin Turkey; I knew a few of the guys who worked there, but that was it.

Heritage started out very well; they got into the very beginnings of the US wargame market, after the initial imports of Minifigs and some of the smaller lines. Getting UK figures was a little hard to do, as you had to do everything by letters and international money orders; Heritage stepped in to fill the vacuum in the market, and did so with figures that were better then what else was on offer. They were a huge presence in the historicals market, and were the first figures that really caught on in the fantasy one - keep in mind that RPGs were still too new, and the emphasis was on huge armies fighting mighty battles. (Ask Gronan about the ones at the Tin Turkey, where the tables were in danger of collapsing from all the lead on them.) I bought a lot of their figures, over time, for areas that I was interested in.

What they ran up against, in a very short version, was a kid named Tom Meier and a company called Ral Partha. RP went right into the fantasy RPG market, with individual figures; Heritage had blister packs with six (usually) of the same figure, which didn't appeal to the RPG players.

RP went from strength to strength; Heritage had the problem of being run mostly by classic wargames guys, and it was a while before they got on the RPG bandwagon with their 'Dungeon Dweller' line. By that point, they had lost a lot of RPG market share to RP, and were also losing market share to RP's historicals - also by Tom Meier, and much better sculpts.

We also saw, at the big conventions, that they had some really huge display games going. I heard from the booth guys that the cost of these games was chalked off to marketing, but boy - did they look and feel like a lot of money was going out the door to pay for all the overhead. Great displays, and very cool looking, but a high proportion of the company's casting output was going into the games and into the painting seminars that the company was doing; As I recall, they were trying to break out into the paint business - I still have some of the paint jars that they sold and/or enclosed with the sets - and a lot of lead was going into this area of marketing as well.

There was, from what I saw and was told by the booth guys, a lot of overhead expense being absorbed by the company. I was a good boy, and kept my mouth shut, and didn't ask if all the marketing was actually bringing in the revenue. The miniatures biz is a pretty low-margin, high-cost, labor-intensive one for anybody, and from what we could see at the time they were pumping the money out a lot faster they could take it in.

I was very startled when they introduced plastics. Back then, the molding for plastic injection molding - especially for hard styrene - was mind-numbingly expensive, and there just wasn't enough money in the market to pay for it back then. The investment for doing plastics didn't come down low enough until much later, and my gut feeling is that the overheads in both the marketing displays and the plastics line is what killed the company off. Too much investment for too little return, I thought at the time, and still think today.

(By the way, if you like these figures, Michael Thomas at Classic Miniatures got a lot of the old lines, and still produces them. We've gotten vintage figures from him, and been very impressed by the quality and the service.)

Because the game industry is so small, it's very hard to get the benefits of things like 'economy of scale'. Metal miniatures are relatively easy to manufacture; resin is cheaper to invest in, but costs more in labor to make; soft plastics are cheap to make - you don't need to spend as much on molds, and they last longer - and hard plastics have to have a huge market to be profitable. See also the Perry's and their lines, or Warlord's.

So, that's my view, from my perspective. I do miss those old Martians, though!

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Oh Blessed Karakan, I'd forgotten about the sterling silver eyespoons.

You know, to a young whelp raised on Warner Brothers, Bored of the Rings, and Monty Python, it sometimes seemed like Phil had no sense of humor.

That just ain't so; it was just a lot less Chuck Jones and more Oscar Wilde. We thought the eyespoons were about the funniest thing we'd ever heard of.

Phil's humor was both literary and dry. Although, he was never adverse to our doing slapstick for him...

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

You know, I used to dread "What has Chrine been building NOW?" when you were on the other side of the table.

Or there was poor Tom Thompson who seemed to consistently guess WRONG with his "wonder weapons." Remember the LXXXIII Chinese War Rocket Artillery Battalion?

For those not familiar with Chinese war rockets, their aiming was, shall we say, somewhat approximate.

Hee! Hee! For me, that was the whole point of gaming. The world is full of the downright silly and amusing, and way too much of it has been handed to soldiers who have been told to simply get on with it. No matter how goofy the idea might be. Google 'Panjandrum', the WWII secret weapon; due to the marvels of YouTube, you can see what happened when they pushed the button.

We played a lot of "Chainmail", and I had a lot of fun building little units of very silly stuff that always caused a fair bit of panic and consternation when they were placed on the table. Gronan would always peer at them with a worried look, and get the twitching awfuls when I'd oh-so-casually mention that I'd just read a really neat article on something. We'd called this 'gamesmanship', and he'd do it to me just as well; his figures were lovingly painted to depict some great hero of the Middle Ages, and the little lead warriors always seemed to live up to the reputations of their originals. (You wanted to keep a mallet handy for the little snots.) I usually managed to 'get' him and the other regulars, and there would be the mighty battle cry of "YOU BASTARD!!!" that would ring down the halls of Coffman Union and bring in all the other non-engaged players to see what I'd done this time.

So, anyway. Tom and the war rockets. I had whipped up some Asian figures with rocket tubes for laughs, knowing full well that they were more or less useless on the battlefield against troops that were any good. The British Army manual for war rockets plainly and quite specifically states that they are "good only against uncivilized bodies of warriors and Americans".

Tom was an accountant by trade, and he did gaming like an auditing excercise. He was a number-cruncher of the number-crunchers, as as soon as he saw my little band of rocketeers he just had to have some. (There was a lot of copy-Chirine-'cause-he's-a-studmuffin, back in those days.) So, he spent an amazing amount of money to build a massive unit of the things, and it looked really fearsome on the table when it finally lurched into action.

Turn one, and he cuts loose, and starts rolling like a maniac on the "Chainmail" tables. The rest of us laughed our fool heads off for the next hour, as the rockets went every which way except in the direction of my army. I sat there, having a burger (there was nothing else to do, and I was hungry), while Gronan took over an hour to resolve all the casualties in Tom's army from his own war rockets. And then, the Big Finish! Tom had roll a morale check, and his units failed from left to right in perfect military order. And failed big, too; they routed off the table, never to be seen again that game.

I think I lost a couple of figures from hangnails, Gronan said.

Later, when we discovered those little 'party poppers' that look like little bottles and blow paper streamers out of the bottom when you pulled the string, the house rule at my table was that we used these to simulate war rockets - anybody hit by a paper streamer had to roll to see how badly they'd been hit - as it just seemed to be more fair. And just as funny, too.

Timer's gone off - time to mate hulls to eighth ray tanks!!!

Much like Chirine's "Red Cataphracts" I had one or two units that were a terror to their enemies. My "Knights of the Garter" were rightly feared by every French knight on the continent. And in skirmish games, nobody got in Sir Polidor's way... more than once.

My "Scarlet Brotherhood", a Viking band with blood red shields, on the other hand had the reputation of i) never failing a morale check and ii) never living to the end of a battle. They had a lot of company when the Valkyries came, though.

Thanks Chirine ba Kah I always thought it might have been the plastics that brought them down. Sad really, they were ahead of their time with that. It's also sad that Games Workshop managed to be the ones that brought miniatures gaming into a more mainstream audience.

But yeah, Tom Meir, still the best sculptor in the business bar non. Don't get me wrong, the Perrys are still great but Tom's amazing. Personally digital sculpts and the resulting creep to 33mm "scale" are a pox on the hobby.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Much like Chirine's "Red Cataphracts" I had one or two units that were a terror to their enemies. My "Knights of the Garter" were rightly feared by every French knight on the continent. And in skirmish games, nobody got in Sir Polidor's way... more than once.

My "Scarlet Brotherhood", a Viking band with blood red shields, on the other hand had the reputation of i) never failing a morale check and ii) never living to the end of a battle. They had a lot of company when the Valkyries came, though.

Yep; it made "Chainmail" games pretty interesting, it did...

Originally Posted by David Johansen

Thanks Chirine ba Kah I always thought it might have been the plastics that brought them down. Sad really, they were ahead of their time with that. It's also sad that Games Workshop managed to be the ones that brought miniatures gaming into a more mainstream audience.

But yeah, Tom Meir, still the best sculptor in the business bar non. Don't get me wrong, the Perrys are still great but Tom's amazing. Personally digital sculpts and the resulting creep to 33mm "scale" are a pox on the hobby.

Yeah, I think so too; it was the tooling costs that were the killer. Another decade, and they would have been very successful in the market. GW managed top make it pay, but they were also riding the front of the huge change in molding technology. And I think you're right; the later GW multi-part plastics have a lot less 'charm' then the older one- or two-part ones did, at least to my tired old eyes.

Poser illos in games also don't do anything for me, but here the digital technology saves the day - I'm looking at illustrating both "To Serve The Petal Throne" and the second edition of my miniatures rules with color (!) photos (!) of the miniatures we used out at Phil's. It's cheaper for me to do it that way, and people might be amused to see the Glorious General and his troops in all their manliness advancing on the foe. Or Harchar and his pirates - sorry, "honest seafaring merchants"! - carrying out their wealth-enhancement strategies. Or Princess Vrisa, in her various suits of armor and party frock. (That last is for those of you who aren't interested in pirates. Sorry; "honest seafaring merchants".)

I think perhaps part of Heritage's over-enthusiasm was part of the whole "Gold Rush" mentality Chirine and I have talked about before.

No, it didn't bring huge numbers of new companies investing in gaming instead of high tech stocks or something; what it DID do was change the expectations of what was "a strong company."

Jon Peterson has chronicled TSR's sales in the late 70s... $300,000 in 1976, double that in 1977, and just shy of $1M in 1978. This was the most unheard of thing anybody had ever heard of, and the rate of sales continued to increase into the 1980s. Much like the US housing bubble of 2004-2008, everybody was convinced that this state of affairs would continue forever. Sinking major money into plastic injection molding looks a good bet when you think the marked has only started to grow.

In actuality, and with the benefit of hindsight, 1983 or 84 is when the bubble popped but good, and it wasn't coming back.

It's why, I'm afraid, when people STILL say "how can we make RPGs mainstream," my answer is 'We can't.' D&D was featured in "E.T.", the top-grossing movie in history for several years. You don't GET more mainstream than that. But those things happen once. You might as well try to revive the hula hoop.