Wargames Vermin

It's been a really nice day...

Yesterday, I completed the last of my February work flow and so this morning I had a lie-in until 6:24AM at which point I wandered into my studio with a coffee and proceeded to get all of the cleaning and preparing of the work for March out of the way.

My good lady wife was taking a day off by chance, having worked from home over the weekend on some government/education statistical tomfoolery and so we had a rather enjoyable pootle into the Derbyshire countryside, for a late lunch in Matlock and a relaxed drive homewards, in the golden-red afternoon sun, both well relaxed and feeling as if we were 'wagging school'.

And so, after another hour and a half at my desk, polishing a few little chores off, I am enjoying a rather pleasant glass of Shiraz and typing this epistle to the apostles of gaming before indulging in a little more wine and hot toasted muffin and an episode or two of 'Neverwhere' that rather fine surreal fantasy by Neil Gaiman thoughtfully serialised in the 90s by the BBC.

And so, I hear you exclaim 'What in the name of Frankie Howerd's toupee, has that got to do with vermin?'


Nothing at all, save to set the scene of serenity which infests the Dark Tower this evening.

You will note, that not a single F-bomb has been dropped? S-e-r-e-n-i-t-y...

And so to vermin.

I confess that my creative juices do not flow into the gravy boat of gaming these days, when it comes to painting. The reasons are well known by now. But that does not mean that I have no interest; on the contrary, I am just as big a fan of my gaming as the next 80s survivor. I just don't want to spend whatever time I have left, creating beautiful figures without being paid for it.

But I do want to game...

And so you will imagine my surprise and joy, when surfing that Bay of Evil yesterday whilst literally watching paint dry, to find a 500 piece Skaven army ( yes that's the vermin of which I speak) for £475.00.

The painting was generally, a neat block finish, in bold colours, and true, the characters and a few Rat Ogres need a repaint - after all they ARE characters - but, less than £1 per figure... I'd be mad not to.

And so, you can imagine what I did, given that I am not supporting the Triples show with my wallet again, this year, (nor indeed will I be entertaining any wargames show until the rather splendid Britcon in August) and that despite my best efforts at the Festival Of British Railway Modelling the other week, I am still very comfortable in the wallet.

Yes, I offered £375, and what is more my offered was accepted. This means that regardless of model size, I paid 75p per figure, plus there are assorted books and 3 carrying cases. OK, so I sacrificed the purchase price of a pair of DCC fitted Pacific class locos, but trust me, when I say that I have not flinched one jot, at that offering to the gods of gaming.

This is what the money got me:


Here are a few close-ups...


Now, I have spoken to other luminaries and trusted kinsmen, and it's been universally agreed that a spot of work on the bases and some Vallejo sepia wash (with a few overpaints of red weapon blades) will make all the difference, together with the aforementioned repainting of characters.

After all, quantity has a quality all of it's own as 'Big John' Holmes said... Or maybe it was a Russian fellah, I don't recall.

With properly painted characters and clean and neat ranks of cannon fodder, this should mean that I am on the path to the upper world in a few weeks, hacking and slashing at the pointy-eared tree huggers and fancy pants humans, generally causing much mayhem and plague as I do so.

Remember my rant the other day about 'what Oldhammer is'? Well, this is it... It's about doing yur own thing, having fun, and caring not whether you could win a painting competition. 

Look, I have won 22 of them in my time (more actually, as I went through a period of binning anything less than a first place), many of them seriously top drawer events. I've been on the the covers and in the pages of the best wargames magazines, and I have appeared on Model Town on The Discovery Channel, so what do I have to prove to anyone?

No sir (or madam), I am going to have me some fun. Plain old, simple FUN!

Right, if you will excuse me, the hour is late, and my wine glass is looking emptier than Santa's sack in a whore house.


TTFN

Comments

  1. The Responsible One23 February 2016 at 14:42

    I'm very jealous. Good find, and with only a little work to be done. The army basically looks like how I'd have wished my Skaven army could have looked, around about the mid 90s...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Hides23 February 2016 at 23:02

    I concur... With a brown wash it will sit nicely between the two decades.

    ReplyDelete

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