The History of Wargaming Project is a wargame publishing house that was started in 2008 by John Curry to preserve, reprint, and expand classic and professional wargaming materials. By 2015 it had published sixty books and by 2015 this number had reached over a hundred ... and the total continues to grow.
The latest publication is FORGING THE FIRST FANTASY WARGAME: A COMPANION TO TONY BATH'S HYBORIAN CAMPAIGN, and it is probably the ultimate compilation of articles and documents that relate to Tony Bath's famous Hyboria campaign ... which was taking place as the earliest iteration of DUNGEON & DRAGONS was emerging.
The book is also a follow-on to TONY BATH'S ANCIENT WARGAMING: INCLUDING SETTING UP A WARGAMES CAMPAIGN AND THE HYBORIA CAMPAIGN, which included:
- The text of Tony’s PELAST AND PILA Ancient Wargame Rules
- The text of his campaign rules, which contained the following chapters:
- Map movement
- Contact, battles and after effects
- Playing with umpires and without
- Supplies and replacements
- Guidelines on running campaigns in other periods.
It has taken John Curry many years to search for and acquire copies of Tony Bath's numerous articles, maps, and other documents and meld them into a highly readable book that will fascinate anyone who has even a passing interested in this famous fantasy wargaming campaign.
The book has 246 pages and the following chapters and appendices:
- Foreword
- The Hyborian Campaign and Early Role-Playing Games
- Introduction to the World of Hyboria
- A Fantasy Game in an Ancient Setting
- Potted Biographies of the Main Characters of Hyboria
- Maps of Hyboria
- Part 1: Hyboria, the Campaign that Grew
- 1: Small Steps
- 2: Leaders with Personality
- 3: The Rise of Conan
- 4: The Road to Empire
- 5: Zembabwei and Shem
- 6: Treachery and Skullduggery
- 7: War for Sea Power
- 8: The Battle for Zembabwei
- 9: Battle for Kyblos
- 10: The Postal Campaign Begins
- 11: The Battle of the Wargaming Giants
- 12: The Battle of Nippur
- 13: Politics and Role-playing
- 14: The Battle of Zarka
- 15: Tax and Propaganda
- 16: The Final Settlement
- Part 2: A Wargamer's Guide to Hyboria
- 1: Empires, Confederacies Etc
- 2: Large National Units
- 3: Provinces, Principalities
- 4: Duchies, Counties, Etc
- 5: Towns
- 6: Royal Family Trees
- 7: General Notes
- 8: Sample Shadizar Herald
- Appendix A: Amphibious Campaigns: Greeks versus Persians
- Appendix B: Medieval Rules by Tony Bath
- Appendix C: Micro Ancients by Tony Bath
- Appendix D: Tony Bath's History of World War II
- Appendix E: The Society of Ancients
- Bibliography
The map of Hyboria that was included in the Second Portable Wargame Compendium.
Reading this book filled in a lot of the holes in my knowledge and understanding of the famous Hyboria Campaign and it now occupies a prominent position on my bookshelf of important wargame books ... and I suspect that a lot of other wargamers will enjoy reading and be inspired by this book.
FORGING THE FIRST FANTASY WARGAME: A COMPANION TO TONY BATH'S HYBORIAN CAMPAIGN was written by Tony Bath, compiled by John Curry, and published in 2026 by The History of Wargaming Project (ISBN: 979 8 1747 6787 4 [Paperback]; ISBN: 979 8 1709 7398 9 [Hardback]).
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I'm really looking forward to this book. A few years ago I also started to collect a lot of Hyboria's articles on my blog. For those interested, see here: https://snv-ttm.blogspot.com/p/tony-baths-hyboria.html
ReplyDelete
DeletePhil Dutré,
I also tried collecting various Hyboria-related bits and pieces over the years, and this book filled in a lot of the gaps. I’m sure that you’ll enjoy reading it!
All the best,
Bob
PS. Thanks for the link! It was very interesting.
I would be very interested in thecahracter development sections.
ReplyDeleteQuantrilltoy,
DeleteI think you’ll enjoy reading about the various characters involved in the Hyboria campaign.
All the best,
Bob
Thanks for the feed back on this book Bob - It has moved to the top of my "To Buy" List
ReplyDeleteMaudlin Jack Tar,
DeleteCheers! I hope that you enjoy reading it.
All the best,
Bob
Until you mentioned it on the VWC Bob, I was unaware of its existence. It's essential if you are interested in Hyboria and Tony Bath's campaign. I've seen a lot of the stuff scattered around the internet, but it's nice to have it in one place and some is new to me.
ReplyDeleteIt could have done with a spellcheck / proof read as there are major typos in some of the introductory chapters.
Wasn't aware of the Featherstone / Bath fall out before? Wonder what that was all about?
Neil
Bath vs Featherstone: IIRC it was about the "story" elements of wargaming, e.g. writing up a battle report from the point of view of a general or other participant. Featherstone was more on the "gaming" side of things, Bath on the "story" side.
DeleteNeil Patterson (Neil),
DeleteI must admit that the book wasn’t published with the sort of fanfare I would have expected. Perhaps it was not expected to appeal to the new generation of fantasy wargamers?
I get the impression that it may have been put together using OCR scanned documents that no one checked very thoroughly. It ended up with things like ‘in’ being rendered as ‘m’. It is not unique to this book as it is something that I’ve noticed in re-published works from a variety of publishers.
I gather that both men has very definite views about some aspects of the hobby, and that it was one of these difference that caused them to fall out.
All the best,
Bob
Phil Dutré,
DeleteI must admit that surprises me … although I think that if pushed, I’d favour the Bath approach as I really enjoy the narrative/storytelling approach to wargaming.
All the best,
Bob
Bob, yes I was beginning to suspect OCR scanning as it resembles rendering hand written notes into text without the advantages of a human transcriber!
DeleteIf Phil is correct, it seems a fairly trivial thing to fall out over. I was expecting politics or a bitter argument over a game, or similar.
Neil
Neil Patterson (Neil),
DeleteWhen I submitted the text of Joseph Morschauser’s book for publication, I re-typed the whole thing to make sure the number of typos was minimised. It was also proofread.
I remember Eric Knowles telling me that many of the early wargamers could sometimes be a bit prickly and that falling outs were not uncommon … often over quite trivial matters.
All the best,
Bob
This is wonderful news. Even though I likely have parts of the book already, as I'm guessing part 1 are the Battle magazine articles, but always excited to discover something new on this iconic game.
ReplyDeleteWEK 3,
DeleteThere is some stuff that was featured in BATTLE magazine but lots of bits from ‘lost’ archives.
Read and enjoy,
Bob
I have ordered a copy today!
ReplyDeleteMark Cordone,
DeleteGreat news!
Read and enjoy,
Bob
Thanks for the heads up; I think I feel a copy coming on for me as well!
ReplyDeleteGonsalvo,
DeleteI’m sure that you’ll enjoy reading it if you buy a copy.
All the best,
Bob
I'm very late in my comments, but Feedly has been acting up and only reported this post late last night. Maybe I need to find another software feed for the blogs I read?
ReplyDeleteI was surprised to read of this publication as I regularly visit the History of Wargames Project website and it does not appear as a "Latest Book" and I've not received one of John's newsletters about it. However, the content does look interesting, more for the introductory sections and the appendices as I already own the content of Parts 1 & 2, the former as an e-book I created by scanning the cuttings I took from Battle magazine and the latter as the duplicated "Wargamers Guide to Hyboria" that Tony sold manu, many years ago,
I am a little surprised at your reprts of OCR induced typos and hope that these are not too obtrusive as I'm rather allergic to such things (and they are normally fairly easy to cure by running search and replace in Word for whatever errors are typically being induced by the cobination of the original font and the OCR software version). Still, this concern has not stopped me ordering the hardback.
Mike Hall,
DeleteFunnily enough, I've also been having problems with Feedly no updating the feeds unless I refresh it every time I use it.
The publication of the book does seem to have flown under that radar, and I only found out about it as a result of a comment made on a WhatsApp group that I'm a member of.
I understand that the book was proofread and checked, but I know from my own experience that typos can easily be missed, despite taking extensive pains to avoid them. I use MS Word to produce my books and always use the 'Review' and 'Spelling and Grammar' functions ... and then have them proofread by someone who is an experienced proofreader. Despite this, typos still manage to creep through.
All the best,
Bob
And I've just noticed a typo ("manu" for "many") in my comment, just to prove that a careful proofread - which I did do - can so easily fail! I'll try your suggestion of refreshing Feedly every time I use it and will see if this helps (I really do not want the bother of changing software, if I can avoid it).
DeleteMike Hall,
DeleteI was talking to another writer recently … and we both agreed that when you have a new book published, it is almost a 100% certainty that you spot a typo on the first page you look at!
I hope that the Feedly trick works for you.
All e best,
Bob
Mike,
DeleteYou might be aware I have on my website a collection (of links) of many of Tony Bath's articles and things he wrote, also thanks to the scans of an original copy of the "History of Hyboria", that are in the possession of Rudi Geudens (but Rudi passed away some years ago, and now his son has these papers). If you would have a scan of the original "Wargamners Guide to Hyboria", I would be most interested!
As for OCR and typos: sad to say, but this is a frequent occurrence in books published by the History of Wargaming project. I fully understand that it's not an easy job scanning and correcting old texts, but in the intro of this new book, Rudi Geudens is spelled wrong, which is unfortunate.
I have seen your (very useful) website - indeed, when I was scanning and converting Tony's two volumes of the "History of Hyboria" I eventually found your site's scan of the contents and used it to source the text of the final page (which had faded too badly to be read on my copy). I have used OCR to convert the two volumes into an e-book (actually a Word document that I fed into Calibre for conversion), to which I added maps from the Battle Magazine articles. I have not distributed this as I think the copyright remains with the Society of Ancients, and I’ve not asked for their views on this.
DeleteI regret that I’ve not scanned the Wargamers Guide to Hyboria, though it is sitting on my “to be scanned” pile - along with two old special editions of Wargamers Newsletter. Unfortunately, my old scanner died and that on my printer is very, slow so I’ve not been motivated to complete these projects, especially as the genealogy tables will probably not react well to my free OCR programs. I do though have a Word (and thus an e-book) version of the Battle Magazine Articles.
Making these copies taught me a lot about OCR and typos, and how to automate their identification & correction and I hope that not many remain in my versions, though realistically there will still be some.