They say as you grow older you revisit your youth. They also say that fantasy wargaming, or to be more specific, fantasy roleplaying games are experiencing a renassaince as many older gamers who left gaming for adventures in real life are returning to the game tables seeking the enjoyment that fueled their youthful years. I think both statements are true because as an older gamer from the late 1970s, I find myself returning to the one thing I enjoyed most in my teen years: fantasy roleplaying. As a result, I am picking up the older Dungeon & Dragons rulebooks as well as the newer materials such as Pathfinder. I am meeting people that would have been my friends from that time period and we are having a great time. We’re even tossing our political differences out the door and enjoying the things we have in common which just goes to show that while politics can divide people, fantasy wargaming will reunite them!
Back in 1983 I had joined one of the science fiction and fantasy book clubs and one of the books they sent me was Bruce Galloway’s Fantasy Wargaming. I enjoyed the book, used elements of it for my D&D campaign, and eventually put it up when I engaged in the mundane world tasks required of a father and business owner. Lately I have had more free time with my role as a college professor and responded to some of my students who asked me if I had ever played D&D or Pathfinder. One thing led to another and I began to do some research into the new world of fantasy wargaming. Things have changed a lot since I put up my dice, but one thing remains constant. Role players are having a blast and with new technology and social media, getting playing groups together is a lot easier.
That led me to building a new campaign and I pulled out my old stuff and missed my copy of this book. So I picked it up from Amazon and there once again were many ideas that led to many hours of fun for my players. What is interesting is that today there are many more RPGs out there than there were in the early days of roleplaying. Older systems have either been discontinued or upgraded with new editions. New systems have sprang from older systems and some of the older games have been picked back up and restored. Thanks to the advantages of file sharing, some of the older games have players using the old rules or systems years after the game was discontinued.
As a historian and an educator, I naturally like to peek under the hood of the RPGs and see how they were constructed. What I’ve found is that many of them show signs of multiple influences and one of those influences is none other than Bruce Galloway and this book. As a DM I found this book to be very influential in the development of my campaigns. Galloway took us into how history, mythology, religion, and fantasy fiction could be combined into a workable game system or campaign. Galloway took roleplaying away from pure combat, “See monster, kill monster, loot monster,” and showed us how to add elements from fantasy fiction to the game so we could build a story. I’ve never forgotten that and am very grateful that I was able to buy another copy of Fantasy Wargaming.
Let’s get something straight about the book and its contents. It is not the work of one author. It is the combined effort of several men from Cambridge who roleplayed for several years and decided to write about their gaming world and system. Galloway was one of the main writers who also was the primary editor for their material. The book is actually a collective effort. It is also not a book about how to play D&D, but rather a book on how to make your game world or campaign a more exciting place. I think many people were expecting something else.
The book does contain the bare bones of the game these guys had put together. It by no means is a rulebook for that game. It was not meant to be either. I also got the feeling that there was to have been a sequel to the book with the game system fleshed out. Unfortunately, Bruce Galloway was killed in an accident in 1984 and that seems to have put an end to the possibility of a follow-up to this book. I read a webpost about this book a few years ago and gleaned more of the back story of this book from it. You can read it here: [...]
It appears the game in this book was never finished. Some play testing was done, but the group broke up before working on it in greater depth which explains the poor quality of the rules and the barebones structure. Still, FW had a sizeable impact as it spawned two different sized books and the large book version saw at least four printings before the publisher went out of business. I really recommend getting this book if you want to be a DM of any medieval RPG. Galloway had an undergraduate degree in history and I believe did some graduate level work in that field as well. It definitely shows in this book and it will help to make your campaigns more lifelike. My players usually comment on my campaigns about the structure of them and that’s a direct result of reading this book. Galloway’s influence is strong.
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