Stupid or selfless?

Back in 2002 I created an American Civil War variant for Games Workshop’s Warmaster rules. I called the game ACWarmaster and I figured trying to go commercial with such a product faced several hurdles. First, there is the obvious legal entanglements with Games Workshop being that the rules were for Warmaster. This problem, however, is not insurmountable since a Warmaster WWII variant in the form of Blitzkreig Commander made it to market. Secondly, I think a lot of you have had a great idea for a set of home rules and you thought, “Hey, I should publish these, become famous and make a fortune.” The only problem, of course, is the cold reality that the publishing costs will be too high and the number sold would be too low. I mean, really, who wants to own 500 unsold copies of their own rulebook? So if you’re like me you think, “Oh heck, I’ll just release it on the Internet for free.” Which, as you might imagine, kills any chance for huge profit and makes me either stupid (for not trying to make money) or selfless (for letting you all play a great game for free).

Well, a lot as happened since 2002. The biggest thing is that Warmaster now has a brother called Warmaster Ancients published by Warhammer Historical Wargames ; and, since the release of Warmaster Ancients, I’ve gotten a fair bit of email asking if I had plans to update ACWarmaster for these rules.

Well, obviously, it makes more sense to use the historical Warmaster rules rather than continue to use the fantasy rules so one thing I plan on doing over the next few months is give the ACWarmaster rules a good once-over and several play tests using Warmaster Ancients. I will use this blog as the official link location to the most current files and I can report on my progress with the update

As of right now, the most current ACWarmaster files (version 1.3) can be found by following this link.