In The Beginning

What the hell am I doing?

Look, this was never my plan. I was never that in to Games Workshop stuff. I played 40K for a few months - you know, about long enough to get over that first "wow, these guys have chainsaws!" moment and realise that you really, really suck at painting - before the obsession went the way of all hobbies. Happily I moved on, safe in the knowledge that tiny plastic men would never again rule my life...

Fast forward to a couple of months ago. A group of disparate ragamuffin former employees are called in to the Edinburgh Games Workshop store for pizza, painting and p... p... pnostalgia. I am not one of them. (For fairly obvious reasons, given that I never worked there.) However, Andy Law and Andy Leask were, and the Warhammer bug bite them hard. Soon, Andy's forum was filled with talk of Warhammer Fantasy Battle and our pre-roleplay chat was a confusing swirl of armies, campaigns and painting techniques. But I didn't mind. I wasn't going to join in or anything. I'm crap at painting. I don't have the time. Or the money. Or...

Raaargh.

Balls.

Vampire What Nows?

Ok, so I'm weak. I know this. I would point out this is just an excuse to hang out with friends, but that's not really the point, is it? The point is that now that I'd committed to playing, what army did I want to play? I was working from a position of ignorance (our roleplay campaign is set in the Warhammer universe, but I'm still pretty ignorant of anything other than Andy's peculiar homebrew setting), so I figured something easy to paint would be a good choice. And skellies are easy to paint and any errors can be written off to decay and general dirtiness. Plus, there was a vague character link to our campaign and no-one else was playing them. So, the undead it is! Easy, huh?

Or not.  Turns out that Warhammer has not one, but two undead armies.  Either these guys:

Batty.

Or these guys:

Boney.

At first glance, the Tomb Kings (lots of skellies, Egyptian theme), was more to my taste than the Vampire Counts (erm... vampires). However, the models for the Tomb Kings are VERY Egyptian in styling, and that didn't fit my stupid, character inspired army theme (necromancy, skellies, zombies, ghosts etc). In truth, half the Vampire Counts army didn't fit either (there's a lot of, well, vampires in the Vampire Counts, along with a surprising numbers of not actually undead things, like ghouls), but the properly undead bits did, and it's not as if I'm playing to win here, so I don't mind ignoring half my army list.  Hell, less stuff to paint, bonus!

So I went out and acquired a bunch of zombies, a bunch of skellies, some more zombies, some more skellies, some flaming skellies on horses and a couple of characters.  Looks like I've got a lot of painting in my future...