Oldhammer's Alive!

Orlygg has organised an Oldhammer day at Wargames Foundry in Nottingham, most likely on 24th August. I may well be going; I know a couple of other people planning to make the long trip from the Celtic wilderlands, and so a lift up there should not be a problem. The problem, as always, is choosing (or rolling), collecting, and painting, my warband.

A very dark (and not in a good way) photo of some random (but not random-ised) Chaotics

I have decided to declare 'Oldhammer's Alive!' and collect all new miniatures for my warband. Naturally, I'm only going to choose those that capture something of the classic Warhammer aesthetic, but I'm not going to be bound by this. I am taking my lead from the OSR here; while the old models and books are cool, and are great if you can get them, making the movement about out of production models and books limits participation and makes it a hobby for collectors and old-timers. In the OSR, it is the retro-clones, and the second generation of OSR games that have taken their lead from older play styles (whether near-clones such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Crypts and Things, or new games such as my new love, Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG), combined with the ease of publishing that .pdf and print on demand (PoD) offers, that have made Old School gaming accessible to anyone who wants to get involved. Flint-eyed eBay scouring, searching for that Rules Cyclopedia, is not required.

So I have set myself the task of building an perfectly [un]acceptable Realms of Chaos (now, if only Games Workshop would release that as a PoD product, or even as a .pdf - come on, look to dndclassics.com) warband using only in production miniatures. I could trawl eBay, I could rummage through the white metal that is hoarded here, there, and everwhere in our house. But I do not think that the OSR is/should be all about nostalgia, and I do not see why Oldhammer should be either. I will, of course, post pictures of my progress as I acquire the miniatures, and as I slowly and crudely paint them.