THROWBACK THURSDAY: Faking Family History

The brave solider poses with his gorgeous wife before heading off to war

Short of the amazing props made by people like the HP Lovecraft Historical Society and the contributors to the fabulous Propnomicon blog, old photographs are among the best tools to add an air of verisimilitude to role-playing games set sometime during the last century or so.

However, not everyone has a family history full of explorers, gunfighters and soldiers and this is where those rare photographic studios that offer 'olde time' pictures come in handy.

With a range of period props and costumes, you can create a slice of history - in sepia - that your family never knew it had... and then use the pictures as the basis for role-playing characters!

Timmy The Flea

Whenever I come across one of these studios, I like to take the opportunity to get dressed up and pose for an old time picture. Not only do these make for interesting 'conversation' pieces when displayed around the home (I'm beginning to sound like an advert!), but they are unique role-playing props.

It's not cheap (the last one Rachel and I had done cost £32 at the National History Museum of Wales around 20 years ago), but then again you don't find these specialist studios in every High Street or on street corners.

We're not talking about those online apps where your head gets badly Photoshopped into a fake film poster; this is the full works, as you can see from my examples above, and each one conjures up a string of stories and possible scenarios.

And I know these days you can do this via AI, but that can be very hit and miss - as well as being ethically dubious.

There used to be a photographic studio in the Trocadero Centre in London, which was stocked with Wild West and gangster costumes (Pete has a picture of him and some friends as 1920's Chicago gangsters in his stairwell), but that closed many years ago.

If you happen to stumble upon one of these places, and are looking for that special prop for your role-playing game, an 'old time' picture is a worthy investment of cash (obviously it doubles as an actual souvenir as well!)... and who doesn't like dressing up every now and again?

Timmy The Flea's Hole-In-The-Head gang portrait

PROJECT 60: Settlers Are Arriving and The Town Is Growing

My first collection of painted gunfighters for Dead Man's Hand

PROJECT 60 - and particularly my plans for the Wild West skirmish game, Dead Man's Hand - is really gaining momentum now.

Today, I received back my first batch of painted miniatures from my painter, Matt. You can get a taste of what they were like unpainted here and check out the pictures in this post to see what an amazing transformation Matt's skill with a brush has brought to them.

They are posed outside my latest building acquisition: a completed and painted MDF Western blacksmiths (with stable), a great purchase from eBay.

This will sit nicely with my nameless saloon, and the other buildings I have yet to build myself (those that came in the Dead Man's Hand Redux starter set and a couple of others I was unable to resist).

I'm pretty certain I already have enough buildings to create a small town, suitable for play.

I just need to boost up my number of miniature gunfighters - and innocent civilians - and (once again) tidy up the games room, so I can display all this material and do it justice.

Luckily, I am already assembling a second wave of miniatures to dispatch to Matt as soon as possible, but there are so many lovely 28mm Western miniatures out there that it's easy to keep getting distracted.

In the front we have Cullen Bohannon, Jonah Hex, Timmy The Flea, and The Man With No Name 

Beside The Man With No Name, we have Django (complete with coffin) and General Custer

Beyond this fantastic development, I've also been tinkering in the garden room, rebasing some old Western miniatures in my collection with the flatter Great Escape Games bases instead of the chunky Games Workshop ones that were my default setting more many decades.

A quartet of characters in the process of being rebased

I also need to summon up the courage to start assembling a couple of gangs from the multipart gunfighters that came in the Dead Man's Hand starter box.

I have ideas for themes: one based upon my own Hole-In-The-Head Gang, led by Timmy The Flea, and another based upon the main characters of The High Chaparral TV show.

I'm just slightly reticent because of my stroke-addled lack of manual dexterity and the minuteness of the parts for the figures.

PROJECT 60: Work on Dead Man's Hand Has Begun!

Work on my Dead Man's Hand skirmish game has begun.

I have dispatched a number of miniatures to be professionally painted, including a gang of Law Men, some Legends of The West (including The Man with No Name and Jonah Hex), and a selection of appropriate Wargames Illustrated's Giants In Miniature figures (including Django and his coffin, General Custer, and several American Civil War characters).

Oh, and there's a 3D printed figure - from Minijenix - included that's going to be Timmy The Flea, the leader of my homemade outlaw collective, The Hole-in-The-Head Gang.

To that end, I have plans to build six or so other miniatures from the plastic parts that that came in the Dead Man's Hand starter box. I suspect these will take time and a lot of trial and error.

That also means I shall - eventually - be getting round to building and painting the plastic buildings .

It's been years (decades?) since I painted anything, and that was mainly drybrushing scenery pieces (walls, rocks etc).

So, I'll need to invest in some relevant paints and brush up (pun intended) on simple painting techniques for wooden buildings.

Great Escape Games has this introductory video that I shall be watching on repeat until it sinks in.

This later part of the project will come to fruition when the weather gets better and I'm able to spend extended periods of time in our garden room (which has been designated the "craft room") and I can superglue fiddly bits of plastic and my fingers together and splash paint around with merry abandon.

PROJECT 60: PIVOT!!!

My parents' copy of A Pictorial History of The Wild West, which I treasure to this day

Honestly, it should come as no great surprise to anyone that in the last few weeks I've dramatically pivoted on my choices for my PROJECT 60 (geeky things I want to have up and running by the time I turn 60 in late 2026).

If you've been paying attention you'll already be aware that my much-talked fantasy heartbreaker/Frankengame is dead and my RPG focus is wholly upon my recently launched Villains & Vigilantes campaign for the Tuesday Knights: Knight City.

While superhero RPGs - primarily V&V - weren't the first I played as a youngling, they were the first where I felt we had the makings of a long-running campaign, thanks to the sterling work of my old chum, Steve (elder brother of fellow Tuesday Knight founding member, Pete).

I've ensured that there are traces of those original games evident in our current setting, Knight City, and some of the rules tweaks I've employed are based upon changes that Steve created four decades ago.

However, it's not just the roleplaying side of PROJECT 60 that has been flipped. While I'm still intrigued by the 16th Century Border Reivers of Scotland and am very happy with the painted figures I have, and large library of reference material, there was always something niggling at the back of my mind.

One of things that had drawn me to gaming the lawless shenanigans of the Border Reivers had been my perception that this was the closest we had gotten to the American Wild West on our island.

But then, if I was so inspired by the Wild West... why wasn't I gaming the Wild West?

One of my techniques for corralling my spiralling thoughts has always been the principle of returning to square one, remembering what first caught my attention.

And this reminded me that, when I was about six or seven, armed with a bag of plastic cowboy and Indian 'army men' figures, and some cool, clip-together Old West buildings and fences, the very first "wargame" I wrote for myself centred on lawless, Frontier gunfighters.

Years before I even heard of roleplaying games, this was a skirmish game where each figure represented a single gunfighter, and they all had access to certain skills, with "tests" being resolved with a combination of normal six-sided dice and "average" dice (my first exposure to 'non-standard' dice... I was hooked from an early age, thanks to the vintage wargames shop on The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells). 

My interest in the Old West can be traced to my parents' copy of The Pictorial History of the Wild West, a battered, well-read, hypnotically-illustrated, "true account of the bad men, desperadoes, rustlers and outlaws of the Old West - and the men who fought them to establish law and order."

Young me could frequently be found pawing through this tome, marvelling at the period photographs and losing myself in the stories of Billy The Kid, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday et al. 

Since then, I've always had a penchant for Westerns, and - at the climax of my three-year Scriptwriting for Film and TV course at Bournemouth University - I even wrote a Western film script, inspired by true events, for my final assignment.

During my great roleplaying interregnum - the extensive period of reading, but never playing, RPGs between the end of our old superhero play-by-post game and then the launch of the Tuesday Knights - one of the games that I was really hooked on was Shane Hensley's first stab at Deadlands, the pre-Savage Worlds iteration of his Weird West setting.

I didn't fully grok the overly-complex rules system but I absolutely loved the backstory and the writing of the atmospheric 'fluff' of the setting. 

While, I guess, these might appear quite 'old school' to modern sensibilities, the rules books, supplements and box sets of that original Deadlands remain, in my eyes, some of the greatest RPG material ever produced.

What all this reminiscing has led to - after doing my due diligence and watching a lot of YouTube reviews and 'actual play' videos - is my investment in Great Escape Games' highly lauded Dead Man's Hand Redux.

This is a well-supported game, from a popular company, that most definitely has legs and scratches my itch for a skirmish game even better than the Border Reivers.

Like I said, the Border Reivers project remains ongoing, but it's on the backburner for the moment, while I dig into Dead Man's Hand Redux, turn my hand to painting the plastic buildings (boy, this takes me back to my childhood), and get the miniatures professionally painted.

With the plastic miniatures you get in the starter box, you're able to design your own gang and I already have ideas to base mine on Timmy The Flea and The Hole-In-The-Head gang, if my primitive modelling skills are up the task!