Nostalgia, or how I started this wonderful hobby

I got into gaming like, I believe, many of my generation; first role playing games then miniature painting and then wargaming. To be exact, it all started with livres dont vous êtes le héros (Fighting Fantasy) when I was around 8 or 9; I still have my entire collection actually! Then I started role playing games, at first with the simple Oeil Noir, a french RPG, and then we moved on to D&D, Runequest, Stormbringer and many, many more. In those days, it was all about fantasy. 

It all started with those...

It didn't take very long for me to discover miniatures. At first I bough a few Ral Partha miniatures for our D&D game, but out of fear of ruining them I stopped short of painting them! We then discovered Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and then Citadel Figures and not long after that my brother and I bought Warhammer 3rd edition together (that book was like a month's allowance for us!) and the rest, as they say, is history. My brother quickly settled on the Dwarfs and then the Undead, but I was always attracted to Chaos first, mostly due to my love of Michael Moorcock's fantastic Elric Saga. My parents got me Realm of Chaos the Lost & the Damned for Christmas and I was hooked for life. The family legend says that, when my mother first saw the cover of the book she refused to buy it, and that it took all of my father's convincing talents (boys will be boys and all that) to change her mind! 

The infamous cover. Can't say I blame my mom!

That book, alongside Slaves to Darkness (which I got soon afterwards), are in my opinion the best things Games Workshop ever produced (and it's not even close). The sheer size and wealth of information available, the bizarre artwork, the weird stories and just the overall atmosphere of the books are unparallelled. In those days, Chaos was truly twisted and bizarre, and both the books and available miniatures reflected that. And I loved it! 

So I started a collection of Chaos figures and then later Goblins (when the 4th edition came out), in the hopes of having an army one day. However the cost of figures, even in those days, for a child living off an allowance was prohibitive (I have absolutely no idea how children do it today, in this world of 130$ Nagash). And my lack of self-discipline also meant that I would rarely finish a figure, let alone a unit! I would spend days and days designing armies, dreaming of future purchases and of playing on fantastic looking tables like the ones I would see in White Dwarfs. But in reality little was happening. Eventually my brother and I played, using mostly unpainted figures, half-units and proxies (the horror!), until we reached around 15 or so and our interest in little lead men was replaced by an interest in little women! 

We came back to Warhammer a couple of years later in the early 2000s, and we bought new shinier figures, actually painted our armies and played quite a few games between ourselves and in clubs. As sacrilegious (and, frankly, stupid) as that might sound I replaced all my old figures with new ones and put the old ones in a box in the shed!  

But the rising cost of the GW hobby (™), the incessant army list changes and the look of the figures themselves made me look elsewhere. I discovered historical Wargaming and spent most of the last decade working on Napoleonics and cie. 

My brother and I still play once in a while, using either the 3rd edition or sometimes the 6th, with many house rules.

A few years ago I discovered the joys of buying old figures on Ebay. I very slowly bought some of my old favourites, but it was purely from a collector's point of view. But then I discovered a few "Oldhammer" (old school Warhammer) blogs and rapidly got the bug. It was such a great idea!

So I went back in my old boxes of figures accumulating dust in the garage, and Simple Greened the hell out of most of them! I started actively collecting everything I needed to complete my units and my armies, with an eye for all things Chaos from the Realm of Chaos era and Goblins from the 4th edition and older.

My main goal was to recreate a Chaos army, the one I wanted to do when I was young but never had the money or skills to do. Really, call it unfinished business. For that I decided to use mostly Citadel and Marauder figures but also a few Ral Partha and other miscellaneous pieces I found in my old lead piles.

I've been working on this Chaos army for around 9 months now, in between Napoleonics and Biblical projects. More on this in a future post.

So a nostalgia post would not be complete without a nostalgia figure, of course. 

This Lord of Change, still in my collection and still in active duty, was painted circa 1991(ish), and at the time it was by very far my best work. I was so proud of it, you have no idea. I still think it looks good today, considering his age. Almost all of the figures that I painted in those years have either been sold, repainted or lost, but trust me on this; it was way, way better than anything else I painted during that time. And it has seen a lot of battles over the years (as evidenced by the loss of its tail...).

 

















Well that was a lot of rambling for one post, hey? I just want to give a big thanks to the four blogs below, in no particular order, who were instrumental in getting me back to my wargaming roots.

Warhammer for adults

Realm of Chaos: An 80s Warhammer Enthusiast Blog

Realm of Chaos (Just amazing painting)

Eldritch Epistles 

and one final note, if you do Oldhammer and I missed your blog on my blogroll, just comment here or send me an email (contact form on the left) and I'll add your blog.