Old West Skirmish Rules back in Print

Steve Curtis, Mike Blake and Ian Colwil's venerable Old West Skirmish Rules from the 1970s are back in print!



http://www.wargaming.co/recreation/details/westerngunfight.htm

Why might these be of interest? Well, Bryan Ansell cited the ruleset a an influence on the development of Laserburn (here), and of course Laserburn -> Confrontation -> Inquisitor. And then Jervis Johnson also drops a little photo of the rules in the Inquisitor rulebook (p.172). They are reputedly foundational in developing skirmish level wargaming. By the way, another of the oldschool rulesets appearing in Inquisitor - Heroes - a medeival RPG with a cover by John Blanche is availiable here.

I haven't read the rulebook (yet) but having a quick glance at the playsheets here and here it's detect some of the influences going in to Laserburn (hit locations, percentile, masses of tables, action points, Maybe even Warhammer with the opposed To-Hit table and modifiers. looks interesting tho.

Thanks for this, Zhu! I'm always on the lookout for obscure rulesets from the 70s from which more recent ones are derived. It's like Prehistorichammer.

Thought you'd given up hunting though old rulesets. Roll 1D100 to get back on the horse!

And to drag myself off-topic. Battle: Practical Wargaiming by Charles Grant can be gotten here: http://freewargamesrules.wikia.com/wiki/Battle in its original serialised form (note to self: Mecanno have released PDfs of their 1960s publications, so these are legit). Rick Priestly often mentions it as his first wargame. It's worth looking at as it takes you through designing a wargame, step by step, and basing decisions on real-world data. For Warhammerists it's interesting because Warhammer largely follows the structure of Battle.

Zhu Bajie":xn6u2p0d said:

Thought you'd given up hunting though old rulesets.

Click to expand...

The only thing you can guarantee about me is that whatever I'm into right now, I'll be into something else by the next quarter/season.