How my Warhammer Journey Began
Welcome Brothers and Sisters, I’m James, an average closet Warhammer Nerd who has been drawn back into the Warhammer Universe by a Slaaneshi Fiend (friend) I thought I had left the Grim Dark Future behind me in the late 90’s….but it looks like I am back. Join me on my journey back to social and tournament 40K gaming.
In the beginning, there was a boy of 10 or 11 and he discovered Fighting Fantasy books. It was these fantastic books by the legends Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson that ignited my love for fantasy adventure, that sense of gaming and being the hero in your own story. This in turn lead to playing table top board games such as Hero Quest, Dungeon Quest and the mighty Battle Masters!! Crazy to see how much these games sell for now on eBay. I can remember my poor mum and dad having to play along with my brother and I, good times indeed but i was getting older and my competitive nature thirsted for more!
Fighting Fantasy is where it all started for me… but I soon yearned for more
Soon I started staring through the window of the local GW store and knew i needed to up my game to these little lead warriors. I started playing Warhammer fantasy with my brother and a couple of friends from school, also playing blood bowl and loving every second of it.
However money was tight and those little lead warriors weren’t cheap especially when you were relying on your pocket money and a paper round which back in the 1990’s paid about £3.58 for a once a week advertiser delivery (back breaking slave labour lol) This often called for desperate measures, such as the human blood bowl team being entirely proxied as high elves and in one extreme i clearly remember a blob of blue tac being used as a chaos spawn :-D
I found that as much as i loved the games and the fun had with friends and family i also liked to win…….I would unashamedly build the most competitive beardy, cheesmonger armies known to man and beast. A friend of mine was a great painter and very creative at designing whole armies and fantastic new ideas, he thought up full rules for an undead Man O War fleet and his pride Norse Army. He had made some brilliant conversions and the army really was very cool. One night at the gaming club, which he had started we had a battle. His glorious and fabulous Norse Army and my filthy proxied unpainted disgrace of a chaos army. Chaos armies back then were an overpowered nightmare, open to disgusting abuse by a Bearded McBeardy like me. The centre piece of his army was this amazing mammoth from forge world and must have cost a pretty penny! Well my Level 4 sorcerer made light work of that with one blast from his staff of nurgle, with one roll of a 6 BOOM the mammoth was slain. I still recall the look of utter distain and contempt of my friends face, it took all my will not to express my sheer joy at having nuked the mammoth.
People started to go their separate ways, university, jobs families etc and I drifted away from Warhammer. Apart from dipping my toe into the idea of Warhammer 40k a few years later and getting as far as buying a Daemonhunters codex, things have been dormant, until now………..
You can also follow my Journey on Instagram. I’ll be posting lots of photos videos and sharing my tournament experiences with you.