Friday 22 March 2013

One Last Dance with Wyrd?

Good Friday everyone,

Today I bring you news that will either shock, disinterest or outright bore you.

The past 2 months I've been on a Henchman Hiatus, the aim of which was to sort out the resits (which I've done and booked the next for April [third time's a charm I hope]) and to allow me to promote MaliQuest.

Sadly however the latter never really happened, but that's ok.

I have been using this time to also go over my thoughts about being a henchman.

Don't get me wrong. I love doing my demo days but there have been for the past few months a number of issues that have made me wonder if my time with Wyrd is coming to an end.

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There are lots of reasons this has come to a head, and not all of them are to be discussed here, but if I can I'll talk about the suitable ones now:

1). Being a dick.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on myself here, but I've noticed over the past 8 or so months a steady decline in what I would call "being nice", and at the same time a steady increase in what I would call "being a dick".

I look back over previous posts, and what do I see?

I see that this time last year, before becoming a Henchman I had spent time building my very large terrain piece Chapel Hill, and on a semi regular basis I would write articles analysing the various tropes of Geek culture.

Let's look at the last 6 months, and frankly when I'm not talking about MaliQuest all I'm doing is bitching and moaning.

In other words, being a dick.

That brings us on to the next point:

2). MaliQuest.
Now as you know this is my pride and joy. I've put a lot of work into this, and the game is now not only playable, but it's building up fluff and extras to make it a proper fluffy rulebook.

It's not exactly hard to see why this game is something that I want to promote, however I have been pretty clearly told by Wyrd that this is something I have to do on my own time and that I can not do so while wearing the title 'henchman'.

Now this alone is not a reason to quit, as long as I don't advertise myself as a Hench while promoting MaliQuest and I don't claim Stones, then that's fine.

No the issue I have is time.

I don't have the time to run multiple days a month promoting, and it takes me 2 hours to get to my LGS or Games Club to do this.

In other words, I can't do both, it's either promote MaliQuest or promote Malifaux, and at the moment for me it's MaliQuest.

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You see, when I first started, despite having this blog and being quite an outspoken person, I was not confident in the wargaming world. I had quite a low opinion of what I did, thought my painting and modelling wasn't all that great, but at the same time I wanted to do something to contribute to the wargaming community.

I thought being a Henchman was it, and to begin with it was. Going out there once a month and pitching the wonderful world of Malifaux to dorks such as as myself was a great thing, and my confidence came on leaps and bounds - perhaps too much in some respects (see "being a dick") but now I feel like the only thing I could do now as a Hench to push myself would be to organise a Tourny, and truth be told I'm not really all that hot on them.

But now I look at where my life is. I've got MaliQuest that I really want to push further, maybe even develop my own core ruleset for and sell it under it's own IP (new name and all that), I've just launched New Fairbank Radio, and I'm doing things that this time last year I'd never have even dreamed of.

So you see, I'll be forever grateful to my time as a Hench, but I'm left wondering if actually it's acting as a restraint and not an assist.

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I'm not saying that I'm dropping Henching right now, I'm leaving it for the moment, and in a month or so will come to a final decision.

Anywho, I'm out of time (writing during lunch) and steam.

I'll be giving this some more thought over the next few weeks, and would like to discuss this with Wyrd (after all if they would reverse their decision of supporting my promotion of MaliQuest) then that might change how I feel.

Until then, stay safe and I'll see you breachside!

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley

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