The Slugbait Rumor Mill and Other Stories


Author Nick Baran:

The start of my true love affair with miniature wargaming started with this box.

In 1994 I was part owner of a gaming store with some older, more mature, gaming friends of mine. I was in my early 20’s and playing in a straight edge hardcore punk band called, Halfmast. We were an unlikely group of game store owners: a chemical engineer (our chief investor), a mid-sized retail chain store manager, one of his employees, and myself – an irresponsible punk rocker. We opened the store on the tails of the first big wave of Magic: The Gathering hype. With all of the money we made selling M:TG in our first 6 months we had paid off the chemical engineer’s investment and had a pile of cash `to be invested into another game line. The distributors were pushing a game called Warhammer really hard, and we threw our all of our nested profit into it. Then we did it again with 40K. I started an army for both systems but didn’t fully fall in love with either until a new game dropped called, Necromunda…. Continue reading

Silent Wolf of Suburbia – Personal reflections on Lone Wolf

Tenacious and gentlemanly, even when brought low by chronic coronary artery disease, my metalworker father was going to die. Or at least that’s what 11-year-old me thought. A number of heart attacks and ongoing angina had rendered dad unfit to continue the life of heat, flames and particulate-heavy fumes, and prolonged exposure to ultraviolet light, that he’d known during the course of his decades as an A-grade welder and boiler maker. Soon enough I was bedside in the intensive care unit of the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Hospital, not far from our modest weatherboard home in Salisbury East, listening to talk of coronary artery bypass surgery and praying that, whatever the procedure constituted, it would somehow free dad of his wretched state and restore him to his reassuringly stoic best. Continue reading