What started your trip down the road to VSF games?

[warrenpeace]

Stricktly speaking, I started down the road and then retreated.

Bronze Age Miniatures reminded me of my teenage love for the Edgar Rice Burroughs series on Barsoom, Pelucidar, and Venus. I bought a lot of the older generation of Bronze Age figures, and then decided that I wasn't going to do anything with them. So I traded them to Sinewgrab. After playing with those figures in Sinewgrab's excellent Pulp Alley game last year, I started thinking that small Pulp scale adventures in ERB lands wouldn't be such a bad thing. So started looking at the much more expensive new generation of Bronze Age figures... and am still suffering from the sticker shock!

Although I play TSATF, and have played in a couple of VSF colonial style games set on Venus, I'm not inclined to buy or paint up masses of natives.

[Captain Darling]

Now I have more Landships home-made and commercial than I could ever field at any single game. 

I don't think that's possible just get a bigger table to.play on...

[Governor General]

All of these, in chronological order. When Space 1889 came out I was like "Get Out Of My Head!" then I bought the game and all it's supplements.

[Barry S]

I first became interested in colonials after watching Zulu and had an interest in Jules Verne and HG Wells (particularly War of the Worlds), but never thought about VSF gaming until I saw an advert in a GM magazine of Space: 1889 and The Soldiers Companion.

Come the introduction of the internet and I discover the Major General's site:
https://web.archive.org/web/20071228014907/http://www.zeitcom.com/majgen/index.html

[VSF Gamer]

Always a fan of the Victorian War movies and HG Wells and Jules Vern. Played 40K in it early days and slowly lost interest and then stumbled across the Major's Website and I knew that I had found a  game that would let my imagination run loose. Along came GASLIGHT a few years later and I've been playing ever since.

On another note, I've just moved to a new location and you just don't realize how much scenery and projects and figures (painted and unpainted) you have tell you have to move them. If I ever find everything it will be a miracle.

[Pijlie]

I have been an lifelong fan of Doyle, Burroughs, Wells, Verne (my dad introduced me to those books) and the like. Devoured the SF classics of Vance, Laumer and the other masters of SF when I was young.

Have been gaming since childhood but during college it sort of diminished, then kids came, career started, I would paint the odd figure. Real gaming restarted around 1995 with Battletech and Spacehulk, but the real revival came when I came upon Major-General Tremorden Rederrings Colonial Wargames site around 2001 and it all came together: exotic images, SciFi, weird Victorian tech and building terrain and other stuff.

It rapidly and happily went out of control since then 
I have been playing many periods and rules since then, but VSF has always been special; at first glance quite boxed in by context, but in reality so limitless in possibilities. Love it!

[Dezmond]

Reading Bruce Sterling/William Gibsons The Difference Engine



In particular mention of a Cutts-Maudslay spring wound machine-carbine

Arriving at the southern wing. Mallory found it surrounded by a barricade of clean new saw-horses, smelling of pitch. This section, reserved for the racing-steamers, was patrolled by a squad of uniformed foot-police. One of them carried a spring-wind Cutts-Maudslay of a model familiar to Mallory, the Wyoming expedition having been provided with six of them. Though the Cheyenne had regarded the stubby Birmingham-made machine-carbine with a useful awe. Mallory knew that it was temperamental to the point of unreliability. Inaccurate to the point of uselessness as well, unless one were popping off the entire thirty rounds into a pack of pursuers—something Mallory himself had once done from the aft firing-position of the expedition's steam-fortress.

Mallory doubted that the fresh-faced young copper had any notion what a Cutts-Maudslay might do if fired into an English crowd. He shook off the dark thought with an effort.

[dinohunterpoa]

Conquistador, that's a great thread, CONGRATULATIONS!

In late 1999 I've been very fortunate to exchange a few messages with the very wise Major-General Tremorden Rederring, and in one of them we were talking about the characteristics of the Cobra Imp tank... and he said "very sturdy for Martian terrain". Then I realized that Corben's "Den" may happens in an alternative Barsoom, then I discovered SPACE 1889 and Dejah Thoris...  

In more recent times, Pijlie's blog has been a great source of inspiration! Also Bronze Age and Tin Man minis... specially the naked Dejah Thoris!  
 
EDIT: And I hope the near future will bring multipart plastic Barsoomians of all races!