A New Chapter

 My fellow Citizens, 

I come to you tonight in the midst of a truly historic moment. By now it is all too clear that we are in the grip of an unimaginable cataclysm that shows no sign of stopping. Indeed, all signs suggest that things will only get worse before they get better. Make no mistake, the storm we currently find ourselves in is here to stay, and we will not find reprieve any time soon. 

In such unprecedented times as these, we must be flexible and dynamic. If we are to have any chance of progress, we must adapt to the new changes and the new opportunities that present themselves. We must be prepared to adjust to a new situation, and sometimes we must be prepared to reevaluate our oldest and most foundational traditions. 

For over two-score millennia we have prided ourselves on defying the Space Marine hegemony compeleld on us by Games Workshop, and taken great satisfaction from our identity of independence that grew from it. We have long been a bastion against the hegemonic constructs of Games Workshop's marketing, and the crown jewel of that rebellion has been our fervent denial to ever host Space Marine models within our borders. 

But the Space Marines too have suffered under these arduous times just as we have, and now at last they too have found themselves betrayed by GW. They are no longer the face of GW's hegemonic power structure, and they are no longer the 40k player base's boot upon our throat. Yet even as they have found themselves cast out from power, usurped by unfathomable products of GW's CAD complex, we have stubbornly upheld our long-standing prejudices against them. 

Until now. 

My fellow Citizens, as of midnight tonight, at long last, the Non-Space Marine Player Charter of 2002 and the Space Marine Act of 2004 are to hereby be officially revoked. From this day forward, the Kakapo Empire will officially grant political asylum to any Space Marine refugees from 1998 to 2004 that seek it, and we will officially recognise their right to sanctuary and to apply for full Citizenship within the Kakapo Empire. 

For too long we have considered the Space Marines our adversaries. Make no mistake, we are now trapped in the same storm together, and only by putting aside our long-standing differences and uniting our efforts together can we weather this onslaught. 

Already the first groups of Space Marine refugees are making their way to our territory even now. I implore you, my fellow Citzens, one and all, to strive to ensure they are welcomed warmly as new friends, and made to feel comfortable in their new home. 

Well, there it is. It's happened. After 20 years, it's finally happened. Hell has frozen over, pigs have taken flight, cats and dogs are living together in mass hysteria. 

I'm starting a Space Marine army. 

Of course I'm also starting a Dark Eldar army too, for much the same reasons, but I've never had an official militant policy of prohibition against the Dark Eldar, and have seriously entertained the idea of a Dark Eldar army for a while now. So that's not really too earthshaking. Not like the Space Marines, that I promised I would  never collect, ever. 

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married. 

It was always foreshadowed I suppose. The first Warhammer 40,000 model I ever saw was a Space Marine Landspeeder. When I first happened upon the big store display of Warhammer 40,000 stuff in the local Toyworld one fateful afternoon, there were no Tau boxes on display, so my attention instead wandered to the strange mysterious yellow flying APC I could see on one of the boxes. It wasn't until over a decade later that I was able to put two and two together and figured out that the mysterious flying APC I had spotted as a 7 year old was, in fact, a Landspeeder that my memory had warped - in particular, I had got it into my head that it was a hovering troop transport because I had mistaken the very conspicuous maintenance hatches on the side for doors to a troop compartment and my developing myopia had fused the entire cockpit and two crewmen together into a single enclosed bridge. 

And then of course later on there was the Blood Angels army I happened upon one night when my parents decided to take a shortcut to the Chinese restaurant were going out to which happened to bring us past the local Games Workshop store. 

But despite all that I have, for pretty much my entire hobby life, been legendary for my loathing of Space Marines and my fanatical refusal to ever start a Space Marine army. For decades I resented the publicity and central framing the Space Marines got, and the fact that the entire 40k player base seemed to lean into it, with the fury of a thousand suns, and swore I would be the only 40k player in history to never start a Space Marine army or even own a single Space Marine model, and make my name that way. As the years went on I took enormous, fierce pride in being the cool rebellious non-conformist doggedly sticking to an exclusive hobby diet of alien factions while all the sheeple around me mindlessly consumed their bland Ultramarines or whatever. 

Of course, deep down the truth was that as a Tau player I was being relentlessly marginalised by the wider 40k fanbase, and when you're on the fringes of the group often what you desperately want most of all is to be in the centre. Natalie Wynn is definitely onto something with her Envy-Contempt Sublimation thinking. 

I probably would have kept up this anti-Space Marine policy forever if it were not for GW. It is the one of the world's greatest ironies that the release of 8th edition and the NuMarines ultimately convinced me to start a Space Marine army. See, when GW released the NuMarines and re-framed them to be the stars of the spotlight, it meant that the Space Marines were no longer the golden poster boys they had always been. And that made them cool. That made it OK for me to like them, because now I could hypothetically collect a Space Marine army and still maintain my anti-establishment non-conformist street cred. It was the loophole I needed to reconcile the two impulses. I could collect some Space Marines, and I would be just preserving another part of Warhammer 40,000 for posterity and providing another opposing force for my Tau and Witch Hunters.. so long as I never, ever touched any of those filthy NuMarines. 

With my Envy-Contempt Sublimation re-targeted, I was then able to consider two factors. The first was a shocking realisation of just how little of the Space Marine range actually remains in circulation. While I had been aware for years about just how many GW model lines had been discontinued, I never really gave much thought to how that had impacted the Space Marine range, because they're the poster boys. The star prodigies. GW's flagship product. GW might discontinue other model ranges, but surely they would never shut down model lines for their flagship product. It was only as I sat down, looked through an archived copy of the Citadel Miniatures Catalogues and compared them to the GW website that I finally had the genuinely sobering revelation of just how much the Space Marine range had suffered - pretty much none of it remains available any more. And with that, I then realised just how important it was to preserve the classic Oldhammer Space Marine range from 2003 for posterity, just like all the others. 

The other was seeing an opportunity to do just this. See, I love Jungle Trees. Like, a lot. They are easily my favourite Warhammer 40,000 terrain kit of all time, and easily one of my top 3 GW terrain pieces of all time, and I desperately wish I had gotten more of them when they were still available from GW. In truth, a lot of my quest to collect classic Warhammer 40,000 Battleforce and army boxes is motivated entirely by the drive to acquire the Jungle Tree sprues they contain. Rick Sanchez has his Szechuan McNugget sauce, I have my Jungle Trees. And I've noticed that one of the best remaining sources of Jungle Trees (and their cousins the Ruined Buildings and Battlefield Accessories that I also crave) is in rescuing 3rd edition Warhammer 40,000 starter box sets off Ebay. And those starter box sets also happen to feature a bunch of Space Marine models in them. So if I'm going to be rescuing a bunch of Warhammer 40,000 starter boxes from Ebay, then I might as well put those Space Marine freebies to good use. 

This was all starting to coalesce together into a solid action plan right around December last year, when something truly crazy happened. Games Workshop re-released the starter box for Warhammer 40,000. Now, it was only the army component of the starter box, there were none of the terrain kits and no rulebook or whippy sticks, but on close inspection it appeared that the model sprues for the Space Marine and Dark Eldar sculpts featured a copyright date of 1998 on them, which meant that they were very likely complete recreations of the original sculpts, painstakingly close if not identical. This in turn meant that GW had made a conscious step towards meeting my demands of it, so I removed some of my economic trade sanctions on it and ordered a set for Boxing Day of last year as a show of good faith. 

Supply chain issues due to the general apocalypse going on in the world at the moment meant that it then took almost a year for the box to get shipped to me, and now here we are, with the start of a brand new Space Marine army. Of course it probably won't actually get painted any time soon, not only because there are more pressing things I'm prioritising but also because before I can paint it I have to settle on which Chapter I want to paint them as. 

See, for those of you not in the know, the Space Marines in Warhammer 40,000 are organised into a bunch of different groups called Chapters. Each one has a very, very, VERY distinct colour scheme, lore and identity, though most Chapters can be grouped together as 'Codex' chapters, which means they're normal Space Marine Chapters that don't really do anything unusual. Chapters are a very big deal for a Space Marine army, and there are several ones I like the colour scheme and/or concept of, which makes figuring out which one I want to do a massive headache. 

Right now, here is the current short-list: 

FLAME FALCONS 

Pros: 

- The COOLEST Space Marine Chapter ever. 

- No, seriously. 

- They're Space Marines that fight ON FIRE. It doesn't get any cooler than that (for Space Marines anyway) 

- The Cursed Founding is easily the best part of Space Marine lore, ever. 

- Major mystique and non-conformist points for playing a Cursed Founding Chapter. 

- The Cursed Founding rules for Flame Falcons in Chapter Approved are pretty neat. 

- Can have fun expanding on the Chapter's recent history. 

- An excellent outlet for all my fire-related puns, leaving my Witch Hunters free to focus on in-character roleplay. 

- No official paint scheme means I can have fun with colours. 

Cons: 

- Models would require extensive greenstuff work, since they're all on fire. 

- Sculpting greenstuff fire is a pain in the ass. 

- I kind of want to preserve the 2003 Space Marine model range as it was, and covering all the Space Marines in greenstuff fire defeats that purpose. 

- No official paint scheme means I run the risk of getting constantly harassed for not painting them right. 

- The Cursed Founding rules restrict some of the unit options I can use, and I want to feature as many Space Marine units as possible for maximum diversity and to preserve the entire range for posterity. 

- I'm really not sure I'm comfortable with covering precious irreplaceable 1998 - 2003 models with greenstuff fire. 

- "You're using the normal Space Marine codex for a Cursed Founding Chapter? You have no respect for the lore or the unique character of the army! WAAC! WAAAAAAAC!!" 

- No official paint scheme means I actually have to plan one myself, and still avoid it being too similar to all the other Chapter paint schemes. 

- OH DEAR SWEET GOD NO IT'S THE EMPIRE PROBLEM ALL OVER AGAIN! 

LAMENTERS 

Pros: 

- The second coolest Space Marine Chapter ever. 

- The most relatable Space Marine Chapter ever. 

- Really, if I were a Space Marine I 100% would be a Lamenter given the way my life has gone. 

- "Blood Angels but without the Blood Angel problems except they get horrific bad luck instead" is just a really neat concept. 

- The Cursed Founding is easily the best part of Space Marine lore, ever. 

- Major mystique and non-conformist points for playing a Cursed Founding Chapter. 

- The Cursed Founding rules for Lamenters are pretty neat. 

- All the Natural 1s and appalling game losses I ever have with the army would be completely 100% in character. 

- No, really, I relate to the Lamenters on a cellular level. 

Cons: 

- Paint Scheme isn't the prettiest. 

- Chapter Logo has no transfer decals. 

- Chapter Logo incorporates a checkered background, which is a PAIN IN THE ASS to paint. 

- Chapter Logo incorporates a black and white checkered background, which is even more of a PAIN IN THE ASS to paint. 

- The fucking 2010s retcon. 

- The fucking 2010s retcon took away what made them actually interesting and just made them Blood Angels but shitty. 

- Fuck do I really have to engage with the fucking 2010s retcon. 

- Fuck it's going to get brought up even if I refuse to engage with it isn't it. 

- "Ughuuh, you know that Ackchually they have Death Company all along right? Your army isn't legal and is wrong for a Lamenters army!" 

- "Ughuuh, you know there's this little thing called KANOHN that doesn't care about your feelings right? Dumb baby casual git gud" 

-  "You're using the normal Space Marine codex for a Cursed Founding Chapter? You have no respect for the lore or the unique character of the army! WAAC! WAAAAAAAC!!"

- "You're not using the Blood Angels codex for Lamenters? You have no respect for the lore or the unique character of the army! WAAC! WAAAAAAAC!!" 

BLOOD ANGELS 

Pros: 

- I have an AWESOME concept for a Blood Angels army 

- Spoiler Alert: 90s Comic Book Blood Angels 

- Think About it: Blood Angels themed around the 90s era of Comic Books 

- It'd be so cool and so meta! 

- And they could be led by Rob Liefeld as a Space Marine! 

- This concept is everything my brain has ever wanted to think about 

- I'm actually pretty confident about painting red. 

- Baal Predator goes BPPPPPPPT! 

Cons: 

- Models would require massive amounts of additional pouches to really sell the joke home 

- Space Marine model sprues contain insufficient amounts of pouches for this. More would need to be sourced. 

- I kind of want to preserve the 2003 Space Marine model range as it was, and covering all the Space Marines in pouches defeats that purpose. 

- The Blood Angels army is not a Codex Chapter and is has a very distinct array of unit options and fighting style. 

- I kind of want to showcase a normal Codex: Space Marines army for posterity. 

- Baal Predator is a Unicorn online 

- I don't know I really want to lean into the whole Jump Pack thing. I'd kind of like a shootier, more footslogging Space Marien army. 

- Would have to source a bunch of extra models for Death Company. 

- "You're using a Blood Angels army with no Honour Guard or Veteran Assault Squads? Or Furioso Dreadnoughts? You have no respect for the lore or the unique character of the army! WAAC! WAAAAAAAC!!"

ULTRAMARINES 

Pros: 

- THE archetypal Space Marine army, which would be a plus given the goal is to showcase the classic Space Marine army for posterity. 

- Has all the unit options I'd like to try. 

- Has all the thematic justification for fighting my Tau and Witch Hunters a lot. 

- Captain Motherfucking Ardias 

- Captain Ardias is a stone-cold badass and the single coolest Space Marine character GW ever created. 

- No seriously forget all the ninnies from Dawn of War. They only wish thy could be as awesome as Captain Ardias. 

- Holy shit I could kitbash a model for Captain Ardias. 

- Holy shit I could use that model of Captain Ardias alongside the models of Ui'Kais I'm going to make. 

- I HOLD YOUR DEATH IN MY HANDS!!  

- Let your DARK SOUL feel the LIGHT OF THE EMPEROR!! 

- FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELL THE IMPERIUM'S MIGHT!! 

-  THE EMPEROR ORDERS YOU TO DIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!! 

Cons: 

- The most boring of Space Marine Chapters 

- Not the biggest fan of the colour blue

- Forever Tainted by Matt Ward 

- Will attract ALL the stupid memes 

- Will attract ALL the mean comments 

- "Urrhurrhurrr Rawbutt Gurllymann!" 

- "uLtRaSmUrRfS!" 

- "OMG r u in love with Matt Ward?" 

- Really need a 1990s Ultramarine army to really hammer home the Chaos Gate memes 

IMPERIAL FISTS 

Pros: 

- Always liked the colour scheme 

- Yellow and red is a winning combination 

- Was the first Space Marine colour scheme I ever saw 

- The other archetypal Space Marine chapter, which helps with the posterity mission 

- Also have all the unit options I'd like to try 

- Kind of like the defensive specialists/siege veteran angle 

- Have a special character named Lysander, which pleases my inner Thespian 

Cons: 

- Yellow is a pain in the ass to paint 

- Especially bright yellow

- Also a lightning rod for memes 

- "Oh my god the pain glove amiright" 

- Fuck I'll have to deal with all the Black Library Horus Heresy stuff won't I. Fuck. 

- Fuck I'll get an earful of all the 30k stuff too. 

- Starting to realise I don't really have a compelling hook for the backstory. 

- Aren't they missing that gland implant that lets them spit acid venom? That sucks and is totally lame. 

BLACK TEMPLARS 

Pros: 

- The iconic 3rd edition Space Marines 

- Completely native to 3rd edition, no roots in 80shammer or 90shammer 

- The mixed model squads are kind of cool 

- The poster boys for the starter box AND rulebook, which is a case for the posterity mission 

- Could possibly dabble in Sword Brethren with the 4th edition codex 

- Land Raider Crusader goes BPPPPPPPT!

Cons: 

- Colour scheme is black and white, which is a pain to paint 

- The Black Templars army is not a Codex Chapter and is has a very distinct array of unit options and fighting style. 

- I kind of want to showcase a normal Codex: Space Marines army for posterity. 

- Land Raider Crusaders also seem to be a Unicorn online. 

- Forever tainted by Flashgitz. 

- Oh god I have to choose between assault weapons and specialist close combat options for the infantry squads? But there's only six of them!  

MY OWN CHAPTER 

Pros: 

- Sidesteps a lot of canon bullshit 

- Can work out my own colour scheme 

- Already have a few Chapters of my own invention that could work 

- Can even make them a 21st Founding Chapter if I want 

Cons: 

- Would have to decide which of the Chapters I've invented to do. 

- Oh sweet god this is torture. It's Sophie's Choice I tell you! 

-  I kind of want to preserve the 2003 Space Marine model range as it was, and giving all the Space Marines a wild new colour scheme defeats that purpose. 

- "Oh so your guys are [GW Chapter that has similar colours to mine]?"

So as you can see, it's a tough call. Fortunately for me I've got time for now. 

Start Again

 

It is one of the deepest curiosities of this blog that it does not, in fact, fully cover my main two sets of little metal figures. 

It's in the timing of course. When this blog first tore its way screaming into this universe, fresh blood dripping from its nubile form as it sucked in gaspfulls of icy air into its pulsing lungs and grasped a sword before any sustenance, it was the end of 2013. As explored before since then, I had been painting models for a long time by then, and the history of Millitant's adventures in little metal worlds stretches back long past that point. But most notably, being first started at the end of 2013 means that the entire start of my main army for Warhammer was completely overlooked on here. 

The time has come to correct that mistake. 

There's something in the air now. Something set in motion that shall rule the fate of many. The board is set and the pieces are already in motion. A new concept has begun living rent free in my brain, a vision of a grand sprawling epic that might very well one day soon sweep the internet (or at least the Warhammer part of the internet) by storm. For now it is a secret that only blogs can tell, because it involves an eternity of planning, admin work and writing reams and reams of silly backstory, plus a number of technologies I do not yet possess. 

And the first step on that long road is to know thyself, which means making sense of my own Warhammer armies. And that in turn means that I must finally begin the long, painful, thankless task of sifting through the backstory and units of my Wood Elf army, and reforging it anew. 

In contrast to my Tau army in Warhammer 40,000, whose beginnings are becoming ever more steeped in legend and myth as more and more of my childhood is lost like tears in the rain, the origin of my Wood Elves is much more clearly documented, because it is much more modern. This is because for most of the first 17 years of my existence my pop cultural genre tastes were very early and very, very, very strongly rooted in science fiction over fantasy. Like a lot of cis male lads born in the 1990s, I quickly developed a strong fascination with various kinds of technological machinery at an early age. What started as an obsession with real-life cars, trucks, agricultural and construction machinery and all kinds of aerospace vehicles quickly moved on to Thunderbirds, Beast Wars and this very obscure short-lived 1990s Flash Gordon cartoon once I discovered television (there were many, many, many more such cartoons to follow), and then Men In Black and Star Wars once I discovered VHS tapes, with various assorted space opera artwork running throughout as I discovered books. After discovering Lego I was always much more drawn to the Space and Aquanaut ranges than I ever was the Pirates and Castle ones. Later on when I discovered video games I largely overlooked Age Of Empires in favour of Command & Conquer and later Starcraft. 

There were a few exceptions of course - Deltora Quest and later Harry Potter (because of course it did, I was born in the 1990s after all) remained very conspicuous islands of swords and dragons in a sea of lasers and spaceships, as did Slizers and later Bionicle. And every so often I would shamelessly pilfer some fantasy concept or another and work it into science fiction with Games Workshop efficiency - most of the fantasy universes I encountered in the wild invariably got elevated to 'future'-grade technology, and a lot of dragons got imported into space adventures, often receiving a cybernetic makeover in the process (seriously, why are there no cyber-dragons in 40k? Tolkien Orcs and Elves with spaceships are fine, but you draw the line at a general riding a giant fire-breathing cyborg dragon with a couple dozen laser cannons and missile launchers strapped onto it? REALLY?). But by and large, for pretty much all of my pre-adult life, the rule of thumb when it came to what kind of made-up worlds I liked was "Give me sci-fi or give me death". 

It was in the aesthetics you see. Science fiction, especially the space opera variety that was my favourite, was full of all these spaceships and robots and hover tanks that all zipped around quickly (or stomped around ominously) and made cool noises, as well as all these lasers and rocket launchers and machine guns and such that all made the bad guys explode, which lent science fiction visuals a certain kind of explosive oomph that a bunch of dudes poking each other with sticks (or occasionally dropping rocks on each other) could just never quite match. This mixed with the distinctive brand of savage venomous tribalism that came naturally to me back then (I blame what appears to be a long line of hyper-competitive Tools on my father's side and the cycle of hyper-competition that they fostered) to produce a particularly cringeworthy fanaticism of science fiction over fantasy that persisted for over a decade and a half. Even when I started discovering Horror Films I locked onto psychological thrillers first because oh my god only little babies are scared of ghosts and vampires and junk (yes that really is what my poor wretched misguided self thought once upon a time).

(The other, even more horrifying side of this is that I also had a very unfortunate undercurrent of Toxic Masculinity imprinted on me from a young age, which left me feeling compelled to distance myself from a lot of fantasy content out of fear of it being too girly with all those princesses running around. However hard you might be cringing at reading that, I can assure you that I am cringing at least twice as hard thinking back on it. Fortunately increasing contact with girls in High School - and some key female role-models in the media I consumed - was eventually able to deprogram me of such lunacy)

Throughout this period there was also something else bubbling under the surface after I discovered tabletop games. After getting my first ever White Dwarf magazine copy in early 2006 I was introduced to the Dwarfs that inhabited this strange alien undiscovered country of Warhammer that existed on the far side of the Games Workshop hobby that was by now giving me Warhammer 40,000. This was important, because these Dwarfs weren't like other fantasy civilisations. They had guns. They had flamethrowers. They had a primitive clock-punk attack helicopter. And THAT was enough to get my attention, in much the same way that featuring a clock-punk space shuttle in The Last Hero was enough to get me interested in Discworld. It wasn't nearly enough to win me over to this whole fantasy thing, but it was enough to begin bridging the gap. 

This was followed a little later by another White Dwarf magazine that introduced me to the Empire that inhabited this strange alien Warhammer game. Again, they had guns. And gattling guns. And rocket launchers. And a clock-punk tank. In the White Dwarf they were fighting these Vampire Count guys that had an army of zombies and wolves and ghosts and bats and things and while in the past these kinds of Halloween monsters had always felt kinda lame, these ones actually looked pretty dope. 

Maybe this whole Warhammer fantasy thing isn't as lame as I first thought it was. 

This more or less continued for a few years, before being completely swallowed up in the unprecedented upheaval that began in the 2010s. History is always a tangled chaotic mess of interlinking factors and causes and effects, and it is no different with the history of a person. But nonetheless, most historians traditionally trace the dramatic seismic shift in pop-cultural tastes that comprised the Fantasy Reformation of 2010 - 2012 to three key events. 

The first was the discovery of Urban Fantasy TV shows, specifically Angel, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and especially Supernatural. This was important because, as well as being really fun cool amazing pieces of television, they all featured a common theme of including nominally fantasy elements like monsters and magic in the nominally technological world of 20th century civilisation - Supernatural even had the characters fighting the demons and vampires and monsters with guns. It was just the right blend of modern and fantasy, coming in at just the right time of peak moody adolescence when I was ripe for gothic content, that these shows became the final missing link needed to bridge the gap and get me interested in fantasy... of a sort. 

Perhaps even more importantly for this story, these shows also primed me for what was to come for later... 

The next watershed moment came not long after, around the winter of 2010, when I went through what is quite possibly the only true religious experience I have ever had thus far, almost entirely by accident. By this time I had gotten into the LetsPlay videos of Youtuber Helloween45 - Helloween covered Horror video games, which seemed like the next logical step after discovering Horror films and TV shows. For one of his videos he was forced by technical problems to put together a slide-show of screenshots and ran that with some music over it. Helloween will never know just how much of a profound earthshaking event he was about to unleash when he decided to use the song he chose, on what I assume was entirely a whim. But he made that fateful choice, and I, following his videos, heard that song, and nothing would ever be the same again. 

The song was called Amaranth, and it was by a band called Nightwish. 

Words cannot convey just how profound listening to that song was. See, up until this point I had never really quite gotten music. Like, I could enjoy listening to it well enough, and I could follow Top 40 Pop music enough to converse with the girls at high school about it, but the idea of being as invested in it as much as I saw a lot of people was alien to me. I just wasn't really passionate about music like I was other things, and I could not give a favourite genre, artist or song to save my life (in fact, I actually failed a couple of class projects because of it). But this was different. Listening to this song, for the first time I really felt myself reflected in music. When I discovered Nightwish, I found my voice. 

When I discovered Nightwish, I finally found my sound. 

For the rest of the year, my eardrums quickly began to swim in a soup of symphonic metal as I devoured every Nightwish song I could find on Youtube as ravenously as I had devoured Warhammer 40,000 lore eight years earlier. That Christmas my best friend got me a CD of Dark Passion Play that remains one of my most treasured possessions, and I listened to it religiously for the next year. I would of course later discover other artists of a similar style that I loved, but Nightwish would forever remain my all-time favourite, and Amaranth my all-time favourite song. 

But Amaranth did more than just that. It also opened my eyes to looking at traditional fantasy in a whole new light. It's soundscape, atmosphere and accompanying music video that I watched 1100 times finally got me thinking that epic fantasy adventures could be, well, epic in their own right. And then I discovered this other little number. 

It was called The Last Of The Wilds. 

There are no words in The Last Of The Wilds, just 6 minutes of heart-melting instrumental beauty, and the more I listened to it the more inspired I was of faraway lands of snow-veiled mountains, deep forests of rich green pines, storm-scourged seas at midnight, silver full moons and stars, giant hawks and eagles, fearsome dragons and adventure at every turn. Now, I was finally vibing with traditional fantasy, without any technological training wheels. By now I had also been thoroughly opened up to the subgenre of dark fairy-tales, and had also gotten into Once Upon A Time.

This too primed me for what was soon to come... 

By this stage my curiosity of Warhammer had crystallised into genuine deep interest and a resolution to get involved with it at some point. My starting up with Warhammer was no longer a question of 'if', but of 'when' and 'with what game faction'. The front-runners at this point were Dwarfs (still riding the initial "Oh wow they have guns" factor and piggy-backing my explosively growing obsession with all things Nordic at the time), Bretonnians (having rediscovered them after rethinking everything I had ever believed about fairytales and, as mentioned, Once Upon A Time) and Vampire Counts (plugging into all that Horror shtick that I had deep-dived into in the preceding years and Victoria Frances artwork. Plus I still thought the concept of an army of horror monsters was pretty dope). The Empire and High Elves were also intriguing possibilities. There were also these Beastmen and Wood Elf armies that I remained curious about, having inquired into them in the past (before the Fantasy Reformation) but was unsure of what to make of them, save that the Wood Elves had these cavalry troops that rode GIANT HAWKS which was the dopest thing ever (so much so that I had stolen the concept and given it a sci-fi twist many years earlier). 

Then came the third watershed moment of the Fantasy Reformation of 2010 - 2012. And my fate was sealed. 

In the spring of 2012, around Term 3 of my final year at high school, I began to become aware of the latest video game Blizzard was working on. I think someone might have shared the trailer with me at some point. Regardless of how I found it, this trailer showed me a window into a dark gloomy fantasy world where humans struggled to survive in the cross-fire of wars between angels and demons. In other words, the culmination of all of the things that I had been deep-diving into over the last couple of years. I knew then that I had to have this video game and play through it. I needed to know more

The trailer was for a video game called Diablo III. 

The really important thing happened a short while later, when more information about the game became available and it turned out that one of the playable character options in this upcoming game was a person called a Demon Hunter. Demon Hunters roamed the land of the game's setting fighting Demons with crossbows and various ingenious traps and devices - just like the characters in Buffy, Angel and Supernatural. Demon Hunters went about their adventures clad head to toe in brooding dark cloak-and-hood getup, just like a lot of the characters in the fantasy artwork that I thought looked the most rad. And the female character model looked a lot like a lot of the singers in all the symphonic metal bands that had by now well and truly become my jam. In other words, this character class embodied the culmination of all the things I had been deep-diving into over the last couple of years. It was meant to be. I knew that when I got my hands on this Diablo III video game, that would be the character I would play as. 

I got my hands on that Diablo III video game for Christmas that year, and then spent the rest of the summer enjoying the simpler pleasures of shooting demons in the face with a crossbow. It was tremendous, enormous fun and I loved every second of it (except when the game said no because my wifi wasn't good enough for it). And from then on I knew exactly what I wanted my first Warhammer army to be like - I wanted an army just like the Demon Hunter I had been playing as. I would accept no substitute. In the moments when I could manage to tear myself away from Diablo III, I scoured the Warhammer model ranges for a game faction that would give me the army style I so craved, and began to grow increasingly dismayed when I found nothing that came even close to it... 

... until I remembered that Wood Elf line and gave it another look over. 

Yes. This was it. The Waywatcher models were enough to cue me into this line being the one that would provide me with the army of cloaked hooded bow-slinging anti-heroes that I so desired. Sure they used plain old longbows instead of the cool snappy pistol crossbows I had been enjoying in Diablo III, but that was a minor annoyance at most, it was still close enough. 

And so it was that in early 2013, I went out after my University classes had finished for the day, visited the GW store that was conveniently just a 15-minute walk away from campus at the time, and went home with a copy of the rulebook for 8th edition Warhammer. A few weeks later, I did the same thing and went home with a copy of the Wood Elf army book and a Battalion Box on which to found my brand new army for this strange new world of fantasy adventure. 

It is from that box that came these two: 

The Wood Elf Battalion box contained a surplus of Glade Guard sprues, more than was needed for the units of 16 I had already decided I wanted. I quickly worked out that I would have enough pieces for a full unit of 16 Glade Guard, a small band of 5 Scouts, and then three Glade Guard figures left over. These could easily be made into Characters for a Wood Elf army, and indeed that's what I did with one of them - we'll get to her later. The final two I decided to build as regular archers and put to good use as test models to practice painting on. This was very important, because the Wood Elf model range is one of the most beautiful model lines ever made for Warhammer, which in turn meant that I was absolutely terrified of painting them, because up until then my painting had largely consisted of throwing colour at models until it was impossible to see the undercoat through it. I had almost zero confidence that I would end up doing the sculpts the justice they deserved. 

The only thing that kept me going and persuaded me to try was the colour hobby section in the Wood Elf book. It featured these zoomed-in insets of certain parts of the models, which was important because not only did it show me for the first time that the 'Evy Metal studio painters were not, in fact, flawless in their painting, but also through studying them intensely I finally came to understand how highlighting works in paint. 

When I finished these two prototypes in April 2013, they represented the very apex of my model painting at the time, and showcased the very bleeding edge in my range of painting skills. They combined my newfound comprehension of highlighting with the precision detailing I had honed on Battlefleet Gothic models in the preceding years. I followed the instructions in the painting guide of the Wood Elf book to the letter, because I loved the GW studio scheme for the Wood Elves and wanted mine to look like that. Granted the greens they were painted in were a far cry from the dark drab browns and greys of the Diablo III Demon Hunters that had brought me to them, but it was a happy change since green is my favourite colour. 

They have not exactly aged gracefully, something not helped by their use as a testbed for paint sealing and finishes. The primitive method employed here - a coat of gloss varnish followed by a coat of Lahmian Medium to remove the shine - was never entirely satisfactory and always seemed to leave an unacceptable amount of shine on them even at the best of times, and one of these days I will go back and repair the finish as best as I can with the methods and resources I now have at my disposal. But nonetheless, I was awfully proud of them at the time and they motivated me to keep going with the rest of the army, which only looked better. 

And that then, was the beginning of the Meadows of Heaven.