Gencon was a good time for me. If you are a writer, the writer’s symposium alone is worth going to and they have established writers giving out secrets of writing they’ve learned the hard way. So I learned a lot there. Plus I showed my new game for people to see. It’s a good game. Seeing the wife of a wargamer getting into the game with a cheer after starting out bored with the idea brought a special smile to my face. The game goes for twenty buckaroos. It’s live now.
Names have meaning. Names have power. And different cultures need different names to portray that. The name Cowboy works for an America with a history of wide-open spaces and ranches covering hundreds of miles but the Europeans have no link to that word. And so they use different names. Teutonic Knights. Caballeros. Order of Merlin. Highlanders. Musketeers. Those are names that mean something to Europe and so they have power.
We Americans have a saying. “From many, one.” Some people even say it in Latin. The point is that we all have our differences, the things that make us unique. Even us Cowboys. Especially Cowboys. It’s really hard to say that all Cowboys are one way because we aren’t. There are no generalized traits that match all of us. No ways of acting or being. We don’t think the same way. And that makes us stronger as a group than if we parroted the same ideas.
In the end it was The War that truly changed us all. We could not use the same tactics we used to save the Peloran two thousand years ago. The Shang were not the Ennead and the Terran were not the Albion. The War was different. So we adopted Terran tactics, rescinded many of our most cherished rules, and hoped that that lifetimes of tradition would keep our shared society from collapsing. It did not. We changed. We became more human. And that nearly killed us all.
There are many names for us. Some call us immortal. I try to stay away from that name. We die like anybody after all. Some call us Methuselahs, though I step back there too. Too religious. Cowboy I am happy with. Those of us who served earned that name well. But not every one of us served. And every year there are more of us who never had the opportunity. So we settled on the name Ageless. While a logical fallacy, it has poetry in it.
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