Welcome back once again dear readers to the first Mayday Miss Marcy of November, coming to you live from the PNW as I am currently travelling, which has given me some great chances to see the sights, ruminate on the meaning of providing Answers to Questions, and also work on one of the most adversarial laptops of all time. If you noticed, last week we were without Answers OR Questions because I was in the midst of travelling, but this week, I am here to provide you with the advice you seek before I once again travel the skies.
If you're new here, Mayday, Miss Marcy! is an advice column in which I take the questions that you provide me and come up with the answers I provide me, and combine them into something known as Question and Answer. You can think of this a bit like the advice columns you used to see in newspapers and magazines, and are real and totally still exist.
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Apoplepticly Apolitical
I have a second-order social issue which I would appreciate your advice about. I am in a few gaming spaces which are, for want of a clearer word, progressive - I mean nobody is purposefully hateful or exclusionary, and that there are genuine efforts to include everyone, efforts which bear objective fruit. And yet I have an emergent problem: Game Time often degenerates into Pretty Soon We're All Gonna Get Murdered And/or Eaten, Because Of This Social Media Link I Clicked.
I thought this was just a reaction to, you know, The Horrors; but strangely enough it receded during the COVID lockdown period, but it sure is coming back. In my personal opinion, it fucking sucks, not just for the topic of consideration, but for when it oozes into and occupies recreation/creative/fun time as well. Instead of playing D&D, board games, warhammer, what-not, we are having an impromptu encounter group. On the one hand, I feel that I should, when encountering this, strive to listen, comfort, hold space and so forth.
If people are having an Encounter Group, maybe I should see myself as a Facilitator. On the other hand, I would actually like to play some fucking games or hang out without it becoming an open-air rules-free fantasy session of Apocalypse World, where the reward is ??? Do you have advice on how to gently steer people away from this broad pattern of behavior without either cruelty, or needing to be (even more of) a lay therapist? Some amount of such things seems inevitable, but I'd rather do "some emotional labor, then game" than "lots of emotional labor, no or minimal game" or "no emotional labor (and no game)".
Sincerely, Hugh Mungus
Dear Hugh,
First, you should absolutely not be the Facilitator of your Gaming Group's apparently Random Encounter Encounter Groups, for a few reasons: 1, that is not your job, and 2, you aren't being paid to do that. While the phrase "go to therapy" is very useful, people often feel as though perhaps they can be a lay therapist and fill the role for people, which you are 100% not qualified to do and even if you were, you should not be doing for a gaming group (or anyone, really, therapists exist for a reason). There's always the nagging worry that by helping hear your friends venting and frustrations that you can act as an intermediary and solve some problems, but the thing is that you then have to keep interacting with that person and the boundary between "friend" and "therapist" can begin to wane, and becomes a burden on you while they seemingly get worse. You've become a sounding board at that point, not a friend, and unlike an actual therapist, no one is billing you at 100 dollars an hour and only on certain days of the week.
So, aside from steering you away from your (admittedly seemingly noble) sacrifice of yourself to quell the problem, the actual solution is going to lie in the other way: if you are the "facilitator" or person running these events, I urge you to start putting your foot down about what people can or cannot talk about. If you are not that person, you should speak to the person who is, because there's a fairly good bet that you are not the only person being turned off and exhausted by this type of talk and behavior, and many people are looking for ways to avoid this sort of thing. This is not the same as the pedantic "let people enjoy things" or "can't we just play games without politics" argument; you are not arguing that the media remove or obscure politics, you are asking that the space in which you play them avoids broaching such topics because it is depressing and a downer and you are literally at the event to take a break from those crushing horrors.
Unfortunately, this is very common amongst "progressive" or "liberal" spaces, because they are often run without filters and very often, places where mild and often unhelpful opinions are voiced. Yes, venting about The Horrors can feel nice, but when that is all anyone is doing, it becomes exhausting. I don't need to be reminded that Orange Man Bad, I am already very aware of it, and I certainly don't need it to happen in the middle of round 2 of my Kill Team game. It seems helpful to allow the venting, but the venting consumes any other conversation, and it often tends to feel as though steering away from the conversation or going in any other direction means you 'don't care' or 'are being dismissive', but the reality is more that you are just trying to exist and take your mind off things. And even if you aren't and you're incredibly politically mindful, you still don't need to talk about tariffs or policy or 'how illegal' something is while trying to roll dice or flop cards.
If you are wondering perhaps why I sound so annoyed with you in this response, it is because I deal with this all the time. People are often surprised at how annoyed I get and how dismissive I can be, but that is because I've had to adopt being extremely abrasive and direct in order to stop the issue from repeating itself. There is value in being informed, and there is merit in informing others, but those things need to happen in the right places. Sometimes, I just want to share stupid jokes or chat with friends, or others I want to just reshare art I like or make a comment to someone in jest. My existence is political by the very nature of The Horrors, and boy would I like it not to be, so I do not need to be constantly reminded OF said horrors. I, you, and many others know they are there and real.
The short answer here, at the end of the day, is you need to tell these people that these topics make you uncomfortable and that you are not looking to discuss them. If that kills your gaming group, then unfortunately your gaming group did not really exist except to be a place for these people to be madly annoying, and games were just an excuse.
Historical Moment
Dear Miss Marcy,
I am interested in getting into historicals (in no small part inspired by the coverage on this website), but I don’t just want to paint a bunch of dudes! There are a number of historical militaries that included women, but this doesn’t seem to be well represented in existing model ranges (one female torso in the Victrix ancient horse archers is basically all I have found). Are there any model ranges out there for me? I’m not particularly tied to a specific era except I would like there to be horse cavalry (ruling out WWII Soviets), and I don’t have access to a 3D printer.
Relatedly, if I wanted to field women in periods/places where they aren’t attested in the historical record, am I going to run into stronger “historical accuracy” problems with other players? (This was notably not among the issues addressed in the recent article on historical accuracy.) And either way, what are my options for women modeled in “historically accurate” armor, etc. for such periods/places? I know I could just pretend that my medieval European knights are women/you can’t really tell on the tabletop, but I would know. Should I just stick to fantasy?
- A Woman in the Hobby
Dear A Woman,
Although my initial answer was "I hope not", I have to admit that Historicals are not my jam, least ones that don't involve horse racing or coffee making, so I recruited some help from our Historicals team on this one.
Lenoon:
Dear A Woman in the Hobby,
Welcome to Historicals! There's a lot in this question to unpack but the first thing I wanted to say was that there are
no periods of history where women aren't attested to on the battlefield. They were there, either "out" and presenting as women in formal combat roles,(Soviet Army, Ancient Gauls and Germans, Spanish Civil War, 100 Years War, the list goes on and on) or clandestinely, posing as men (
Angelique Brulon is an excellent example, and she's a firm part of my French Napoleonic army), or as civilians/partisans/volunteers caught up in a battle (literally every other conflict in the history of humanity on both counts). Women were always there, present on the front lines of every period you'd think to game.
Unfortunately, that hasn't yet translated to model ranges! Except STLs or scattered pieces, most model ranges outside of the WW2 Soviets tend to be all male. There are notable exceptions - if you're interested in SAGA, there are huge (and good) ranges of "shieldmaidens" that work well in many, many armies. The biggest and best in the business is Bad Squiddo - one of our favourite wargaming companies, run by champion of gender liberation Annie, with an ever expanding range of female miniatures in realistic, non-sexualised clothing. The only bad thing with the Bad Squiddo ranges is that you end up buying a ton of them. If you want to go down the horse cavalry route, Bad Squiddo have you covered with the Vikings range - these will work for Pillage, Saga, and Lion Rampant among others, and are generally lovely models.
I'd give a runner up prize to Wargames Atlantic - only a few gender-balanced quasi Historicals sets (with more to come) but a massive range of STLs you can purchase printed via places like Only Games.
Accuracy is always a tricky question but the short answer is: it's accurate to have women in historicals armies, so do it. There are periods and armies where some people might look askance - all female battallions of French Old Guard Chasseurs or similar - but in the vast majority of cases a painted/based/collected army trumps any and all weirdness about accuracy. An all-male battlefield is significantly less accurate than a mixed gender one, after all. Historicals nit-picking is really overemphasised and far less frequent than people think - I have at least a few female models and conversions scattered into every single historical army I own, and noone bats an eye - or, to be honest, tends to notice at all. Make your models as you wish, and if you'd like to, find out about female representation on the battlefield of whatever era you pick up. The stories are incredible, and should be better known, so anyone getting out there to tell them via their miniatures is a comrade of ours and welcome in the Goonhammer Historicals Star Fort.
Marcy: Thank you very much Lenoon! And let me say if you're interested in Historicals, none do it better than the Historicals team here at GH, so go give them a look.
Airbrush Aggravation
Hello, Marcy!
I'm an airbrush enthusiast. My first hobby was making gunpla, and I picked up an airbrush before I picked up a paintbrush. As such, for miniatures, it ends to be my first and last solution to everything. For the past few apartments I've been able to have my own little dedicated space for painting, whether it's a workshop and a dining room we didn't use or a living room when I lived by myself. But due to changing financial situations I now live with two other people in an apartment with very bad ventilation. I used to be able to just turn the fan on to maximum and open a window, but now doing that, airbrush fumes still leak out of my very small bedroom, even with the door closed.
I am masked when I airbrush, and I never use harsher materials like alcohol-based paints or lacquers. But even so the fumes the last time I tried airbrushing were so bad that all three of us agreed that it's not a good idea to try again until I have a dedicated airbrush booth to pump the air directly outside. Something I don't really have the money for.
This has completely stopped any and all momentum for any of my hobbies except for sewing. I don't like using spray cans to prime as I find they tend to to run out quickly and are a lot more temperamental. Brushing on primer by hand I've tried once, and I've never gotten it to go as flat as I want it to.
I want to continue with a hobby I love, reconnect with the community stopped engaging with. But I also don't want to cause my friends to choke to death on airbrush fumes. What should I do?
From,
'Appless Airbrusher
Dear 'Appless,
I have to admit that my first thought here was that I was slightly concerned about the fact that you seemed okay with only choking yourself to death, but I think what you are saying is that now that there are more people around, the fumes are an actual problem instead of something that was maybe only an inconvenience to you. That was still bad, which is, well, a health risk more than anything else.
However, I can understand that once you've settled on doing something a certain way, it becomes difficult to do it any other way, and also feels as though you are compromising on the quality of the thing because you are being asked to do it in a way that is less than ideal and brings all sorts of other issues. Rattlecans, as you mentioned, tend to have issues of temperature and quantity, and while there are certainly some great options, I can understand not wanting to use them if you dislike the investment and the inability to use them whenever you want.
I think my actual answer is probably not going to make you very happy, but the answer is going to be that you need to set money aside to get yourself a vent set-up that allows you to airbrush. The issue here is that in the meantime, you're going to also have to do without, but it sounds like you are currently doing that anyway, which is why you are unhappy. I will say I'm not sure of your financial situation or how much you want to invest in this set-up, but I would offer that perhaps something like 50 dollars every so often into a bucket can get you to the set up that you want/need. Until then, I think you're going to have to get creative with how you approach the hobby.
You may want to see if there are any LGS / Hobby friendly spaces in your area that perhaps will allow you to bring your airbrush and use it there. You could even see if there's any art stores or studios that may let you do so for a small rental fee; again, this costs money, but perhaps the amount can justify the work you can get done, and may be less than an actual vent set up. I still think you are going to just have to bite the bullet to invest in a vent set up, both for your roommates, but also for yourself; you deserve to hobby safely and to do what makes you happy, so getting your airbrush back is the biggest and best way for you to do that based off of your letter.
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