In Ages Past...

With the release of Warhammer 8th edition today, I thought I would use it for the inaugural date of my new fantasy-dedicated blog, Abandon All Hope (of ever finishing painting all my miniatures).  For this first post I thought I would start with a little history of how I got into the miniatures hobby in the first place...

A.D. 1987
Long ago, before many of the present generation of gamers was born, I was a big fan of the Lone Wolf series of role-playing adventure game books by Joe Dever.  I still am, and if you haven't read them, I highly recommend them.  Back then, the series was only a dozen or so books, and when I saw a companion book to the series, I immediately picked it up.

The book, although relatively short at 96 pages, contained a wealth of background material on the series, along with sundry other things that piqued my interest.  One section in particular caught my eye.

I had always been into model building, but up to this point it was limited to model aircraft and ships.  I had always been interested in fantasy, primarily the works of Tolkien, but as far as I knew, there was little outlet for this sort of thing.  Well, I had seen Ral Partha miniatures for D&D, but I wasn't too impressed.  I wasn't much into D&D, rather, my interest was in MERP & Rolemaster, so I had little use for D&D miniatures.  But here was a neat diorama of miniatures representing a giak army assaulting a fortress, coupled with instructions on how to model the castle itself.

Very interested, I focused on the little note at bottom.

I dashed off a note of inquiry to this strange company I'd never heard of, asking about their products. Within a few weeks (the mail had to go across the pond and back) I got a response which included a couple of printed sheets containing pictures of the latest releases, mainly some dudes called "Chaos Warriors."  Who just looked totally badass. They even had names, such as:

Strok'nor Macekiller

Balspew Flamesword

Slambo

This guy in particular took several attempts to order him, as he was constantly sold out--no surprise, the guy rocks.  But I finally got him.  He's currently stripped of paint because I had painted him over and over again so much that the layers became so thick that most of the detail was obscured.

As I began to learn more about Citadel Miniatures and their various products, I also heard about this game called Warhammer Fantasy Battle.  Soon I would have to check that out...