Can I be the only Historical gamer/painter?

You might be able to clear something up for me, I'm having trouble understanding the concept of historical gaming as opposed to fantasy. What confuses me is do you recreate historical battles.. like this particular battle in this place between these factions and this is the outcome. Or is itmore of an alternate history thing. Have the two factions but play it out as a what if situation. ie as you play the scenarios change and do not follow the historical model.

I'm interested in some of the ancient battles. I'm not really so keen on anything 20th century as the technology puts me off. I'm more into swords and spears etc. Anyways I enjoy watching anything on the history channnel that is about ancient or medieval warfare. Maybe I should look into historical gaming too

! think Aaron has it just about summed it up there;

If it could have happened or did happen, it's historical; anything without spaceships, dragons or annoying little hairy footed one-expression characters.

Based on what I have observed some (and any historical gamers will probably correct me) historical gamers seem a bit pedantic to me, in that they like everything to be as exact as possioble, down to the ayout of the battlefield and composition of the armies. Some will even "re-enact" battles rather than play what you would think of as a game.

Others are more into "typical" battles, so may field two typical English Civil War armies and have a good scrap, rasther than say "today we will be fighting the battle of ****".

My own preference is a bit further still, more of the alternate history style; fielding armies which could concievably have fought each other but never did; ancients is a popular genre for this. I would have no problem with, as a fairly wild example, an army of Alexander's phalanx against an army of early Britons. It's not something that ever would have occurred, but is within the realms of (my) imagaination. You're getting pretty close to "fantasy" here, but for me the dividing line is the blatantly fantastical, different races, magic and the like. That said, I can see scope for, say, druidic "magic" in a historical game. In the ancient world, for all intents gods and magic were real, at least to the minds of the people at the time, so if an enemy shaman, druid, priest or whatever came up to your rank and started hexing you, you would probably not want to hang around and see if it was just mumbo jumbo. This sort of magic isn't going to shoot fireballs or conjure demons, but it will have a defininate and measurable effect on the morale of the enemy. As far as I know some rules allow for this type for thing.

Pushing the alternate history thing even further, I'd like to play a game based on Harry Turtledove's "the guns of the south" where during the ACW the south gets the kalashnikov!

Amazons I would class as strictly fantasy. That said, there is a bit of a crossover. I'm not much of a fantasy fan but read a book once, it may have been Bruce Gemmel, and it was a fantasy world but without any of the orcs + magic trappings; more of an alternate earth. That would be good, you could include all the warhammer type fantasy humans, just not the other races, dragons and magical stuff.

The "real" magic is an interesting idea I think. Bruce Cornwell's Arthur books got me thinking about that. They have things like "ghost walls" which werea couple of of sticks with skulls on top, but in effect they might as well have been solid stone, as no sane warrior would dare corss them. Likewise if the enemy druid (like you say, before the battle, when both sides were lined hurling the customary insults and empty mead kegs) came up and started doing his bone juggling in front of you, there was no way you'd think about fighting until your own druid came and cancelled the spell. The effect is as real and powerful as any wizard hurling lightning bolts in a fantasy setting.

(and don't forget, even GW wised up and introduced a historical version of warhammer - the latest issue of wargames illustrated has rules for using this to play robin hood!)

And voltiguer, you're definately not the only historical painter! look at my stuff!

I actually started on some historical minis recently but left them as I didn't know if demand would be there.

Historical gaming to me can be done two ways.

1. An exact replica of an actual historic battle, scaled to a representative number of figures. The terrain is as close to what was there, and the conditions reflected in the rules.

2. Create your own terrain, create your own army roughly based on the accepted norms of the period, nationality/ethnicity of the combatants. Grab some and go for it.

Of course you can get into the 'unusual' offerings of ancient Egyptians fighting Medieval Knights!! But most times things are kept reasonable and believable.

...I've already mailed as many clubs as I could find about this board, and we do have a few members who have joined and not posted. I think maybe they looked around and thought it was just a gw board. I rang some of the clubs today and badgered them inot joining up!

As far as I know the most popular are the DBx range; De Bellis Antiguitis for ancients, De Bellis Napoleonic for, well, napoleonics and so on.

But for starters, you could do worse than these two;

www.freewargamesrules.co.uk/
members.xoom.virgilio.it/wargame/english.htm

And Foundry have a few in their library.

As I mentioned above, there is a warhammer historical version which could be good for easing hammer-heads into the historical lark.