I just checked the news and read of the shooting at Munich's Olympia-Einkaufszentrum mall. This follows on the horrific terror attack in Nice that took the lives of 84 people, including many children. The Nice attack, of course, followed other vicious and horrific terrorist atrocities in Paris and elsewhere in Europe.
I can only conclude that an ugly reality has merged with my ugly fantasy of the wargame setting of European Intifada. As a consequence, I am going to cease creating, playing, and posting scenarios for my European Intifada setting. It's just too close to home.
My goal when writing the European Intifada was to create a near-future setting for miniature wargames players that was marginally realistic and located in places they knew or at least knew of. While there has always been the possibility that this scenario could play out in real life, I did not believe that it would come to pass even in part. I always held out the hope that the fictional combatants would always remain fictional and that real life would be a brighter, more hopeful place. While reality hasn't caught up with the dark totality of what I envisioned as a playland, that is a small comfort in the face of the atrocities being committed now.
I would like to thank the readers and commenters of Small Plastic Warriors and I appreciate your thoughts and well wishes. I will continue to create, play, and post modern wargame scenarios, but I'm going to move other near-future settings and alternative histories.
And I'm going to hope like hell that these other imaginary wars and fighting don't come to pass as well.
