Sorry about the absence

Things on the blog front have been very quiet lately and I want to apologise.  I know I made a promise that I would not let this blog descend into the swirly pits of the internet abyss and I stand by that promise.  Unfortunately work has been very hectic at the moment and most of my waking moments are spent sorting problems – resulting in long days and very little weekend time.  What little time I have had free I have been busy painting and modelling – and as such the blog has suffered.

Things are easing though so I’m going to try and update the blog a bit more regularly.  I do plan to cheat a little though – I’m about to write up a number of posts about the projects I’ve been working on and schedule them to appear.  They will therefore look as though I am adding new content over the course of the next week or so when in fact I’m probably off on another painting spree (or work spree if I’m unlucky!)

Do I really want to do this?

During a recent bout of web trawling I stumbled upon a blog that recommended keeping track of all your expenditure on wargame items.  Unfortunately I don't recall whose blog I saw this advice on but did think it an excellent idea.

I'm about to start my own list - nothing fancy, just an Excel spreadsheet with details of each item, where and when it was purchased and how much it cost.

It's that last part that worries me though - am I ready to come to terms with how much money I spend on this pastime!

I'll report back once it's complete and perhaps we can compare - if you dare!

How I got here.

Forgive me for the next post which is pretty much a rambling on how I got into Warhammer again after an aborted attempt in my youth.  I'm conscious that at the moment my budding blog has zero readers and though I'm tyring not to chase off any potential subscribers (I wish) I'm also concerned that it doesn't end up like my previous attempts at blogging which were disastrous wastelands of single posts.

Hence I'm trying to seed the blog with many articles that will magically appear over the next few days thanks to the wonderful scheduling abilities of Bloggers engine.  So while this and other posts will seem to miraculously appear over the next few weeks many of them will have been rattled out over the frantic first few days of its creation.  That's enough exposition though - on with the story of how I became Warhammer crazy - again!

Wales, Aug 2008 - a bit wet.

It was August 2008 and we were stuck in deepest Wales with no prospect of the sun ever appearing.  My enduring memory is of grey skies and damp air.  Unable to enjoy the sights without fear of drowning and with two young children in tow (so unable to voluntarily drown in a hostelry) we found ourselves in a toy shop in some god forsaken village in the middle of no-where.  While the kids ran merry and attempted to purchase every piece of tat a young child could gorge their desires on I spied a small corner of the shop festooned with Games Workshop livery.  Thereupon my eyes fell upon 24x12 inches of pure delight!  The Battle for Skull pass box set.  On a mad whim I found myself grasping it and my credit card as I strode towards the till.  

Forgotten.

The sun came out and it never got opened.

It languished gathering dust in a cupboard, unopened and forgotten.  In 2009 we were having a terrible summer and once again the family were all stuck inside while the rain was tipping down - bored senseless.  In a flash of inspiration I remembered the game tucked away in a cupboard and duly went to hunt it out.

Several hours later, having played the tutorials, an epic battle ensued in which the gobbos decimated the stunties and managed to invade their precious mines and rob them of all their shinys!

We were hooked, and we wanted more.  A great debate was entered and each member of the family had to choose an army to side with.  Rustling of the rule book commenced and searching of the website and we finally all decided on our allegiance and picked an army that we could each command to glorious victory on the battlefield.

Wallet survives attack by GW

A trip to the far flung reaches of Sheffield's Meadow Hall and an (S10) assault on the wallet later and we each had a box of figures and a book telling us about the strengths of our chosen forces. Much hilarity when the guy in the shop called my wife’s wood elves 'girly' – she hasn’t been able to live it down since!

So now we are here and the whole family is Warhammer mad - which I'm led to believe is not normal - but then who wants to be normal?  Over the coming posts I'll detail more about my own army, the Warriors of Chaos, and the armies of my wife (the troll) and the kids (the gobbos).

From the 'What the heck is this' files

Over on the right it says I am a relative newcomer to the Warhammer world - but that's not entirely true.  Back when I was a kid I dabbled in both Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer fantasy.  Back then I had nobody to play with - none of my friends were the least bit interested, and the web - not having been invented - meant I didn't have an easy way to meet up with like minded individuals.  All this meant that my initial foray into the hobby was pretty much relegated to painting the small number of models I could afford and setting up small dioramas in my bedroom.

As a result I have a small number of models from my childhood that are either unpainted or painted badly.  The majority of these models, however, are no longer available.  Some I have been able to track down on the websites that list the Citadel/Games Workshop back catalogues.  A couple though have proved elusive to identify.  Once such model is this:

Glorius though he is - what, or who is he?

It's obviously some kind of chaos demon, and I'm assuming it's from a fantasy game, not 40k.  Definitely from Games Workshop circa 1993 as the tab at the bottom says (c) GW 1993 I think!

The front of the tab has some text which I believe is Rangor - but I've been unable to turn anything up by searching the web.

Rangor - I think!

If anyone has any further information I would love to hear it.

A moan about Blogger

© Games Workshop - used without permission

The above is an extract from the latest Ors & Goblins rulebook - but I could have taken a sample from any of the official Warhammer publications.  One thing I love about Games Workshop is that the published material is gorgeous - and generally consistent.  A few days before I started this blog I was admiring the fonts that they use.  Consequently, when I was setting up 'The Hammer and I' it was my intention to use some similar styling.

The observant readers will probably have picked up on this already - but the titles of this blog are in a font very similar to that used in the snippet above.  I won't pretend to know what font Games Workshop use - that way lies lawyers - but I did find a very similar freely available alternative on Google's excellent webfonts site - IM Fell English. Handily enough the Bloggers tools allowed me to select this font when styling my blog - but that's where my complain lies.  They offer a number of fonts from the Google webfonts list, but it is a restricted list.  I also found on the Google website a font that matched the body text used above - Gentium Basic - I would have loved to use it for the body text in this blog but for some reason Blogger don't include it.

So come on Blogger, add the complete webfonts list to the customise options, before I send in the Gobbos!