Time for a new "Season"

Welcome back to the four or five people who actually check in on this Blog. I guess like for many people, the purpose of our blog is to keep track of our own ideas for our own purposes. For me, I like the idea of having a history document given the years of effort that have gone in to what is now known as Pygmy Games.

So, a bit of backstory:
Pygmy games began almost thirty years ago without any pygmies at all. In fact what we know now began in the pages of Dragon Magazine with a game called Claydonia. My original writing partner and I decided that we wanted to build an adventure using that system, the basics of which were to make heroes out of playdough and fight each other. Well, we built it. It was a massive affair with working traps, water hazards, remote control, ice, puppets and assorted lunacy. It was in no way similar to the kind of thing that Team Pygmy writes and builds today. And in truth, it only involved one current member, me, on the writing team.. However, the line from there to here exists and the basic principal of Pygmy existed from the beginning: Be big, build event games, and have fun.

We wrote a sequel to that first game. It involved using polymer clay rather than playdough and it was set in space...but we never built it. Instead, we ended up writing another sequel that was a step toward modern pygmy games. In the sequel, which took place in the subconscious of a grocery store owner, we worked in 25-28mm (it was so long ago that 25mm was still the standard with a couple of 28s thrown in). This second adventure featured new elements like pyrotechnics, lighting effects and a musical score. The great sadness of the first two adventures is that there are no existing pictures of them as digital photography was still years away. We do still have many of the miniatures and an artifact or two pops up among friends every so often.

Times change and friends move and marry. I found myself in a new town years later with an old friend who had played in the earlier games but had not written one. When the time came for our next monumental adventure, I found myself with a new partner and the core of Team Pygmy was set. We were on an expedition to Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica when we saw the Citadel Pygmies for the first time. This was back in the days when picture of minis in White dwarf were drawn by hand. I immediately fell irrationally in love with the pygmies but the owner would not sell them (they were, and remain in his personal collection). The owner of Aero has since passed away and I have made multiple attempts to buy those pygmies from the current owner, but he wants to keep the collection together so I have to settle for the set I had made by the Games Workshop Archive service (that used to be a thing).

During that summer, we designed an built an adventure for our pygmies. Their chieftain had died and the candidates for the job were tasked with going out in to the world and finding something useful for the village. The one who managed that goal became the new Chieftain. Basically this has been the premise for every pygmy adventure from that day to this.

In the early days we would borrow elements from other systems as our gift was in the painting of minis and the building of terrain and scenery. Much of the terrain we built for those early adventures endures to this day. We spruce it up, remodel and repaint. We add bits and leave bits out but we can see the development of our world over time and I think that is comforting.

After another move (this time to Los Osos) we found ourselves back together again. The problem we had was that the two of us were in a new town and knew no gamers. We heard that there was a game con run by the local university so one year we stopped in to check it out. What we found was that they didn't have anything like what we did. We came to find out that no one really does what we do but at the time we assumed that we were not unique in the gaming world. We decided that it was time to bring the pygmies back out. We knew though, that it was unlikely we would get a group of players to dedicate 14 hours of their game time to the crazy strangers with the pygmies so we decided to go back to Dragon Magazine and run a version of Tom Wham's Search for the Emperor's Treasure with our pygmies and our aesthetic. We had done this once before for a group of friends in LA so we knew we could pull it off.

And we did, not wildly successfully but we pulled it off. In the process, we entered a new phase for Pygmy Games: the Giant Board Game. That is what we basically build now, really big board games. We break 100 sq feet every year and often grow from year to year. During one of those sessions at Poly Con (our home now and in the future) we added the final member of the team, this hobbit/jedi who said he could improve on our graphic design...he was right. While he started as primarily a graphic designer, he has grown to be a critical member of the overall design team.

Fits and starts are what they are. For a while we would try to run a brand new game every year. This was both a good and bad idea and depending on the year, each different member of the team found themselves on a different side of the argument. That argument is a settled issue these days and our model is to design a new game every two years. That cycle is up this year so our Poly Con event this year will be entirely new. My hope is that we will use this space to keep ourselves, and anyone else who cares up to date on the comings and goings of our latest design...Pygmy Festival. We will take this game in to our tenth anniversary year at Poly Con and it will be a blast, just like it always is.

I remember our first Polycon experience where we were beating the bushes to fill our 8 game spots. Now we have to turn players away and we are thankful to the Cal Poly community for giving our lunacy a home.