I am a lifelong geek. Like many others my hobbies have through life taken a back seat in turn to studying, finances, work, other hobbies and family. And like many others the dark days of mid-2020 gave me the space and drive to return to the tabletop hobby, seeking shelter from the grimness of a pandemic-ridden, climate-fucked reality in little made up fantasy worlds where such cataclysms are nothing more than storylines. As I write, in October 2023, I have Covid for the second time. The space from children and work allowed by my sitting alone upstairs so as not to needlessly pass it on has allowed me to vomit up these words. And it has been fun, if a bit of a shame for the overall quality of written output on the internet.
In terms of hobbying, the current game of choice is Frostgrave, chosen for its relative simplicity, miniature-agnosticism and low requirements for numbers of models and scenery. It has proven to give short, chaotic games generating surprising stories and characters.
My first warband, a spiteful malignity of night goblins, gained their individuality through events that happened in our first games. In time these acquired personalities changed the decisions I made with the main two characters, the Wizard and Apprentice, but the other goblins remained indistinguishable and were wholly disposable. And I guess the idea of a disposable rabble works narratively for night goblins but it did always feel a bit backwards that gameplay made character and I struggled to keep track of hitpoints between "club and shield goblin" and "goblin with the badly-painted face". I had also started to find it difficult to find a viably large selection of night goblin miniatures that worked coherently together, or could be easily converted with my extremely limited greenstuff abilities.
Agatha Grunt and her group are my attempt at doing things the other way around.
I don't know why I chose halflings. I've no particular love for halflings or their lore in WHFB or DnD or any other major fantasy setting, noting that Halflings and Hobbits are to my mind entirely different things. But having found an awesome and ridiculous halfling knight riding a dodo via Black Scorpion Miniatures, when I started to look for potential other members I found there were loads of great models out there from various ranges which all seemed to work with one another. Midlam Miniatures in particular have a great choice.
As I collected and painted they gained names and stories before they even hit the tabletop, before they ever made the journey to Frostgrave, if you want: every member has a two lines of notes story, helping to dictate motivations and actions.
The whole process has made the games even more fun. There's nothing new here, of course. Many years ago I remember reading something similar in whichever edition of White Dwarf it was where Tuomas Pirinen set out the first draft of a skirmish game that later became Mordheim.
And so I'll write this stuff down, as and when I find the time after each game, and for as long as I find it fun. Sorry.
Images are my own photos, or else generated by some moral-free, artist-destroying AI.
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