Wee Beeb lives on

A bit of a follow up to my previous post on the death of my father. All the condolences from people I know through Oldhammer have been very touching indeed, and it's deeply moving to see what a kind community it can be.

Geoff Solomon-Sims, after reading the news on facebook, was kind enough to cheer me up by sending a card and a dwarf wizard to paint. Such a fun mini! My dad had left his paints and brushes on the table, so I went to work with them, and this is the result.

What Geoff hadn't realised was that my dad, on account of his round face and beardedness (often leaving him mistaken for Father Christmas at this time of year) had a long time affinity with dwarves. And when I showed the Dwarf Wizard to my mum, she decided there and then that he would definitely have to be named "Wee Beeb".

Wee Beeb was a dwarf character from a D&D campaign at the tail end of the 1970s. My dad had been at an archaeological dig in Falkirk, excavating a shell midden - there seems to be big overlap between archaeologists and wargamers (in fact, he dug alongside Nigel Stillman for a couple of summers at the training dig in Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire). The diggers, when not in a hole or down the pub, would play D&D, and this was when Wee Beeb came to life. One of my treasured possessions is his "Wee Beeb" badge from this time (Photographed here on a Liverpool University Wargames Club cloth, from his days as a mature student).

My dad developed such an attachment to the character, in fact, that he apparently moped around for a week after it met an untimely end. But good dwarves never really die; and Wee Beeb would pop up in many games throughout the years, for example as the name of his character on The Bards Tale on the Atari ST, and Baldur's Gate later on. For each new challenge, a new manifestation of the spirit of Wee Beeb. So it seems only appropriate that the spirit of Wee Beeb would live on.