Thursday 29 September 2011

Watch out! Gobbos!

I'd promised my daughter a copy of the new Orc & Goblin rulebook but she wanted a box of fanatics too.  Was browsing ebay and stumbled upon a guy selling both as well as a bunch of other gobbo bits and bobs - had a speculative punt and managed to win the entire lot for less than the book and fanatics would have cost from GW - was well chuffed.

My copy of Warhammer, The Generals Compendium also turned up today.  So all in all a good day.

Wednesday 28 September 2011

Do I really want to do this?

During a recent bout of web trawling I stumbled upon a blog that recommended keeping track of all your expenditure on wargame items.  Unfortunately I don't recall whose blog I saw this advice on but did think it an excellent idea.

I'm about to start my own list - nothing fancy, just an Excel spreadsheet with details of each item, where and when it was purchased and how much it cost.

It's that last part that worries me though - am I ready to come to terms with how much money I spend on this pastime!

I'll report back once it's complete and perhaps we can compare - if you dare!

Tuesday 27 September 2011

The New Warhammer room

Up until now our warhammer games have been played in the dining room, but for a number of reasons this has been far from ideal.  The main problem, as I see it, is that there just isn't enough room around the table.  The main problem as my wife sees it is that it means we can't eat in there.

Even after explaining that eating was secondary to playing my wife didn't agree.

The dining room taken over
The plan therefore is to have a dedicated gaming room.  When we bought the house last year we did so based on the fact that one of the spare bedrooms would be a 'Warhammer room' but things didn't go as planned, mainly due to lack of time, and it ended up just being a general TV watching room for the kids.

Time for all that to change.  Last weekend was spent clearing out the rubbish and re-arranging the furniture ready to begin the big conversion.  When the room was emptied it became obvious that it needed a lick of paint to freshen it up - which I'm planning to do next weekend.  Until then we've moved back in the TV and the old bookcases.

TV is going to be wall mounted.
The Gobbos in the new Warhammer room

So the ultimate plan is to paint the room - we've agreed on a light green - replace the old bookcases with some newer ones, possibly even wall mounted ones and to mount the TV on the wall.  That should give me enough space to build my custom, permanent games table - more on that in the future.

That was quick

Won an auction for a copy of the Warhammer Skirmish supplement on Sunday and the thing turned up today.  Kudos to the seller for getting it out so fast!  Had a quick flick through - I know it's out of date but I love to collect the Games Workshop material as it is all so gorgeous.
They act as great inspiration for building terrain pieces too.

Also won a copy of Warhammer, The General's Compendium at the weekend and looking forward to that turning up.

How I got here.

Forgive me for the next post which is pretty much a rambling on how I got into Warhammer again after an aborted attempt in my youth.  I'm conscious that at the moment my budding blog has zero readers and though I'm tyring not to chase off any potential subscribers (I wish) I'm also concerned that it doesn't end up like my previous attempts at blogging which were disastrous wastelands of single posts.

Hence I'm trying to seed the blog with many articles that will magically appear over the next few days thanks to the wonderful scheduling abilities of Bloggers engine.  So while this and other posts will seem to miraculously appear over the next few weeks many of them will have been rattled out over the frantic first few days of its creation.  That's enough exposition though - on with the story of how I became Warhammer crazy - again!


Wales, Aug 2008 - a bit wet.
It was August 2008 and we were stuck in deepest Wales with no prospect of the sun ever appearing.  My enduring memory is of grey skies and damp air.  Unable to enjoy the sights without fear of drowning and with two young children in tow (so unable to voluntarily drown in a hostelry) we found ourselves in a toy shop in some god forsaken village in the middle of no-where.  While the kids ran merry and attempted to purchase every piece of tat a young child could gorge their desires on I spied a small corner of the shop festooned with Games Workshop livery.  Thereupon my eyes fell upon 24x12 inches of pure delight!  The Battle for Skull pass box set.  On a mad whim I found myself grasping it and my credit card as I strode towards the till.  

Forgotten.
The sun came out and it never got opened.

It languished gathering dust in a cupboard, unopened and forgotten.  In 2009 we were having a terrible summer and once again the family were all stuck inside while the rain was tipping down - bored senseless.  In a flash of inspiration I remembered the game tucked away in a cupboard and duly went to hunt it out.

Several hours later, having played the tutorials, an epic battle ensued in which the gobbos decimated the stunties and managed to invade their precious mines and rob them of all their shinys!

We were hooked, and we wanted more.  A great debate was entered and each member of the family had to choose an army to side with.  Rustling of the rule book commenced and searching of the website and we finally all decided on our allegiance and picked an army that we could each command to glorious victory on the battlefield.
Wallet survives attack by GW

A trip to the far flung reaches of Sheffield's Meadow Hall and an (S10) assault on the wallet later and we each had a box of figures and a book telling us about the strengths of our chosen forces. Much hilarity when the guy in the shop called my wife’s wood elves 'girly' – she hasn’t been able to live it down since!

So now we are here and the whole family is Warhammer mad - which I'm led to believe is not normal - but then who wants to be normal?  Over the coming posts I'll detail more about my own army, the Warriors of Chaos, and the armies of my wife (the troll) and the kids (the gobbos).

Monday 26 September 2011

Photographing the little beasties

One thing my new blog has highlighted is just how rubbish my photographs are.  So I've been playing with some new techniques to see if I can improve my pictures.

Progress so far:
Existing image.  Need to improve on this.

First attempt. Too dark!
Light source moved closer. More like it
Still not brilliant but I feel I'm getting closer to where I want to be.  The above was with a very makeshift light box, a single light source and a cheapo pocket camera.  The first thing to notice is that it really shows up my amateur paint job!  That aside, I'm not happy with the way the top part of the figure is out of focus.  I'm led to believe this is due to a shop F-Stop on the camera.  Unfortunately my cheapo camera doesn't have the ability to change that.

At the weekend I might break out the fancy camera (if I can find it) and see if I can improve a bit more.  In the mean time I'll finish with a post-processed image that should serve as the starting point for the next post on this topic.

Getting There!


From the 'What the heck is this' files

Over on the right it says I am a relative newcomer to the Warhammer world - but that's not entirely true.  Back when I was a kid I dabbled in both Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer fantasy.  Back then I had nobody to play with - none of my friends were the least bit interested, and the web - not having been invented - meant I didn't have an easy way to meet up with like minded individuals.  All this meant that my initial foray into the hobby was pretty much relegated to painting the small number of models I could afford and setting up small dioramas in my bedroom.

As a result I have a small number of models from my childhood that are either unpainted or painted badly.  The majority of these models, however, are no longer available.  Some I have been able to track down on the websites that list the Citadel/Games Workshop back catalogues.  A couple though have proved elusive to identify.  Once such model is this:

Glorius though he is - what, or who is he?

It's obviously some kind of chaos demon, and I'm assuming it's from a fantasy game, not 40k.  Definitely from Games Workshop circa 1993 as the tab at the bottom says (c) GW 1993 I think!

The front of the tab has some text which I believe is Rangor - but I've been unable to turn anything up by searching the web.

Rangor - I think!

If anyone has any further information I would love to hear it.

Sunday 25 September 2011

The Warriors of Chaos

I suppose it's only right that I should post up details of my current army (if such a rag tag force can be called that) as a starting point for my shiny new blog.  As is blatently obvious from the title of this post my chosed force is The Warriors of Chaos.  I've always been fascinated by these destructive men from the north so it was a natural choice for me.  Although my other love - skelebobs - had me toying with the idea of the Tomb Kings.

So without further ado, onto the current line up.

A moan about Blogger

© Games Workshop - used without permission
The above is an extract from the latest Ors & Goblins rulebook - but I could have taken a sample from any of the official Warhammer publications.  One thing I love about Games Workshop is that the published material is gorgeous - and generally consistent.  A few days before I started this blog I was admiring the fonts that they use.  Consequently, when I was setting up 'The Hammer and I' it was my intention to use some similar styling.

The observant readers will probably have picked up on this already - but the titles of this blog are in a font very similar to that used in the snippet above.  I won't pretend to know what font Games Workshop use - that way lies lawyers - but I did find a very similar freely available alternative on Google's excellent webfonts site - IM Fell English. Handily enough the Bloggers tools allowed me to select this font when styling my blog - but that's where my complain lies.  They offer a number of fonts from the Google webfonts list, but it is a restricted list.  I also found on the Google website a font that matched the body text used above - Gentium Basic - I would have loved to use it for the body text in this blog but for some reason Blogger don't include it.

So come on Blogger, add the complete webfonts list to the customise options, before I send in the Gobbos!

Warhammer Fantasy Counters

When I first started reading my Warhammer rulebook I was a little overwhelmed by the number of things I would have to keep track of during the course of a battle.  the obvious solution seemed to be to use some kind of counters placed next to the units in order to recall what rules were in play.  I thought it would be fairly easy to find some online - surely someone else would have done the same and provided a bunch of them to download and print out.  Unfortunately although I managed to find lots of templates for Warhammer 40,000 I couldn’t find anything for fantasy.

Time to roll my sleeves up and work on my own set.



Instructions are included in the download - but it should be fairly obvious how to put them together.  Printing to card is best, but they work just as well to normal paper.  You can either print and fold for double sided markers, or simply cut them out to have double the number of single sided ones.

Download Warhammer Fantasy Counter set.