Confrontation from around the web

You may have noticed that myself and some of the other Wipsters (yes it's a thing! Click on the badge over to the right and see where it takes you!) are a bit obsessed with GW's infamously abandoned game, Confrontation. I've no idea why we keep coming back to it but we do. It's probably the heady mix of rare figures, rose tinted spectacles and self flagellation that makes want to try to use a system that is ostensibly too complicated for its own good but we see it as a root. From this spiky little tuber grows so many things that we loved and continue to love about the 40k universe. It grew into Necromunda and Inquisitor. It shaped hive worlds and gangs and allowed a move away from playing space marines and bigger and bigger battles. It was the first real delve into the reality that everyday humans had to survive within the imperium of man. It was designed so beautifully by so many of the legendary names with the golden age of GW, Jes Goodwin and John Blanche contributing sketches and designs and guiding the style of the game that captured our young imaginations.

"I don't get it? Why don't you old farts just play Necromunda? Why have you got to be so elitist with your rare figures and your rules only printed in ancient magazines? Get with the 21st century!"

All good points, imaginary young person, lets explore our strange little obsession. Let's have a look around the interwebs. Let me be your guide to whats out there....(it's not much to be fair) so that you may understand the juvenile dementia that we suffer from and so that you can weave around the sites about the Rackham game we don't mention, or the ones about stellar physics or even the ones about the Bob Marley album.

First up, someone has been kind enough the scan the rules as published in White Dwarf. This is on Scribd which can be a pain but should give you an idea of what was presented to us all those years ago. The rules

Then we obviously have to look at the figures. To be honest they aren't all that rare. The majority were available buy for quite a while and, although the main range suffered form plasticarmitis, they are really nice figures that would fit in with most folks Rogue trader stuff Stuff of legends has an overview of the figures and Citadel collectors guide has a more detailed look at the whole range.

Boardgame geek has a pretty good overview of the game and it's setting giving enough detail about the rules and the background. Deathworld by design this article on the Snake Apple Tree blog is another good opinion piece and is from a fellow traveller along the route of re-discovery.

Two of the more recent exponents of the charms of Confrontation are form within the INQ28 scene.
Tears of Isstvan writes a wonderful love letter to the game and describes in detail it's importance within GW's oeuvre. Spiky rat pack has probably gone the furthest of those on line proponents in that he (or they) have sculpted figures, converted gangs and played a game (on the warhammer world goblin city board) this same game was reported on the Opus Maius blog in even more detail but this has disappeared into the ether which is a great shame.

SpikyRatPack

If you want to look at some painted versions of figures check these Brats at Work of Shaitan. A more in depth study of brats and their style can be discovered at The Leadplague, well worth checking out just for the thought provoking ideas.

The image at the start of the blog is taken from the webpage of Martin McKenna who did quite a few of the illustrations for the original rules and has a couple of other lesser seen Rogue Trader pictures on his site. If you are a fan of Les Edwards and his purported Front cover for the never printed rules (that was eventually used on the White Dwarf cover below) you can get yourself a nice print of it at his page.

I would of course be remiss if I didn't point you in the direction of the Confrontation content on other wipsters pages. Leadplague, Magpie and old lead and Antpixi all have several posts about the game and it's figures.

JB's Venators

Axiom's Brats

Antipixi's Gangers

If you are interested in chatting with others about this sort of thing you could do worse than come over to the Palatine Hive on Facebook and joining. Hope to see you there.