A New Beginning

Hi everyone,

A few of us at the Basement Gaming Club are currently undergoing planning for a Heralds of Ruin campaign starting next month. Before we start, we'll have some introductory posts for all the members to explain a little about ourselves, our choices of teams and how we plan to destroy all opposition and have fun while doing it!

I'll start with a confession; It’s official, I have been in this hobby a long time. One my earliest memories is of one of my brothers friends coming over when I was sitting and rolling dice, with no idea what I was doing, “playing” 2nd edition 40K. This was a time when GW just wanted to make a good game, and releasing a box set with a cardboard Ork Dred, not even officially a Deff Dread yet, was perfectly fine because it improved your experience of the game. They were great times. They weren’t even slightly trying with Fantasy to not be ripping off Tolkien, and as seen below Tyranids were a lot, lot closer to their source material.



The first models I inherited solely for myself was a gang of House Escher that I very much wish I still had now. I, of course, messed them right up but spent hours painting them with little to no clue of how the game worked but being six at the time just staring into the White Dwarf magazines, almost every copy from about WD135, made me want to be part of it.

The first box set that was ever bought for me was the below box of skeleton warriors, quite unusual at the time as they were a multi part plastic box set, not something many armies had. I almost definitely bought them because of my love for Jason And The Argonauts as a child and beyond that fact have almost no memories of them. They soon became part of an Undead army lead by the truly epic Isabella and Vlad Von Carstein that I equally have very little memory of.



The next few years are blurry, I went to a lot of mini campaigns and visited Games Workshop Bedford every Sunday for about 6 years, working my way from Undead to Orcs to Space Marines and joining in with the Armageddon campaign and hearing truly epic stories about all sorts of historic events including the Horus Heresy.

When I moved at about 12 my interest waned for a short while but a friend and me soon got into 40K, going to the loft of a local pub weekly to play but I honestly can’t even remember what army I played. I was really just in it to make friends and have fun, and that I did. I think it was Space Marines, but even with all the memories flashing back now it’s very unclear.

When I was thirteen we moved back to Bedfordshire and upon going to Redborne Upper School where new friends were made (Ghost, Ross and Murphy, that’s you!) it turned out people were playing 40K and Blood Bowl but apart from going along after school to hang out and tell stories of the old days (and collecting a Grey Knights army mostly for my own amusement) it did not really re-enter my life until I was a strapping young Junior Soldier training at Harrogate Army Foundation College. My Sergeant asked for a guide to be made for different types of cover in the field, so I put my scenery making skills into building a hilled valley with a river and decided to put together a unit of Cadians, a fun little jaunt that reminded me how much I liked it.

Upon leaving at nineteen and after a nightmarish more than a year of moving, heartbreak and shitty jobs I was roughly back on my feet and decided that I would join in with a few friends with a Blood Bowl league, just buying the one box and having some fun. The Bjornlinger Ravens were born, still my favourite team (Norse rule) and a team I play to this day, the infamous Toki tearing prized players up with great notoriety.



Quite quickly I wanted to get back into the hobby proper and decided Fantasy was for me. About two weeks later I got down to playing a proper game (sorry, Fantasy fans) and started collecting Chaos Space Marines. I was initially attracted because every classic picture looked like a Heavy Metal album cover and the rules were quite new as the Codex has just come out. The army having Dinobots and Zombies helped too.

The rest is kind of history, I sit here a few metres from more than 20,000 points of ten different armies and my interest is still firmly in place and looking to the future. Games Workshop has been absolutely killing it for the last 18 months and I hope they carry on, everything since the introduction of Skitarii has been hit after hit and just seems to keep getting better. The rules may not be the tightest but every game started is unique and fun, and hey, just over the hill seems to be a new edition, we'll see! I’ve never played anything quite like it (not for a want of trying), so may it live a long life with many more fun games in the future!

For the Heralds of Ruin campaign I flitted between a few forces for quite some time, initially thinking Legion or Renegades and Heretics (we play a good amount of Horus Heresy games) before settling on Tyranids. Story, however, is King, and after our first meeting to discuss forces there was some difficulty to reconcile why Tyranids were on our planet of Medea VI. The latest Rules and Team List update on the Heralds of Ruin Website (found here) gave me a chance to re-check the available forces and Ogryns took my fancy. My imagination ran wild and that was that; my team is now a roving gang of Feral Ogryns, ripe for adaptation across the campaign. Who knows, they may even be tempted to ally...

Thank you for making it through my ramble down memory lane, look forward to (probably shorter!) posts from the other three members related to the Return to Medea HoR Campaign. Feel free to comment below with any suggestions, and I'll be back before long with the beginning of my force!