Fortune can be funny sometimes.
I started this year fully expecting to quietly abandon Warhammer altogether, my energy to resist the Sour Prudes spent and resigned to seeing the boot of the Sour Prudes stamping on the face of one of my favourite tabletop game forever. Wherever I looked on the internet it seemed that all that was once green and good in Warhammer was gone, and bothering to defend or cherish it was a lost cause.
Then one of my 2004hammer buddies returned from a Battletech sabbatical with a mighty need for some fantasy action, and after a couple of small scale games I trapped them in a castle. And ever since then I've had more games of Warhammer in the last four months than I've had in years. And it turns out that none of the Sour Prude attitudes seem to have reached across the ocean to here.
It would seem that the wider world is scarcely aware of the existence of Warhammer players in Aotearoa... for which I am very thankful...
At any rate, it means that my love of Warhammer has been resuscitated from oblivion for a second time (or third, depending on how you're counting), and that has me thinking back to how it all started. After finishing the Scouts, my first ever unit for Warhammer, work started almost immediately on the rest of the archers (save one of course) from the Battalion box set, the 16 chosen to become a band of Glade Guard and my first ever ranked line regiment for Warhammer.
These would however prove far more challenging, and ended up becoming the longest and most difficult model project I had ever done to that point. Looking back the actual time period was still not very long, about 3 or 4 months or so, but at the time it seemed to last an eternity.
What made things so difficult was the ranking nature meant all the models had to line up flush together side by side in base contact. This is not too much of a challenge in and of itself, but Glade Guard are your classic hooded and cloaked rogue archer types, which means two things:
1) They have arms thrust directly forward in shooting poses, which project forward.
2) They have dramatic billowing cloaks, which project sideways.
These two features mean that each Glade Guard model occupies extra space, and makes it very complicated to line them all up next to each other without their cloaks pushing into the models next to them and their bow arms poking into the models directly in front of them.
I am not a total dumb-dumb, so I had anticipated and planned for this when I first started the project. My plan was to mock up the poses and positioning of the models by dry-fitting their components together with blue-tack, allowing me to test out how to set them up so they would all fit together nicely. It seemed like a sensible idea, but it had two fatal flaws. First, the blue-tack I had available was not particularly strong, causing the model pieces to fall apart far too quickly and left the models collapsing into each other in a sticky pile of model bits right when I had finished lining them up. The other flaw was that since blue-tack is soft and elastic, the pieces attached to it would bend if they had any pressure applied to them, causing the cloaks in particular to get squeezed into their attached models in ways they never would when glued.
This left me with no other option but to work on the unit model by model, painting up one or two at a time, assembling them, and then positioning them not to bump into each other, which was effective but took a very long time and gave very little sense of real progress. But even after all the models were painted and assembled, the problems still did not stop.
See, when I started the Wood Elf army my budget was not limitless, and certain things had to be sacrificed in the name of procuring the models and rules needed to start - specifically basing materials. For the first couple of months, I had none of the basing materials I had planned to get, and the 'completed' Wood Elf models were blue-tacked to their bases while they waited for them to arrive. This was part of the plan, because I had always planned to paint and assemble the models apart from their bases and then decorate the bases separately, gluing the models down only once their base was finished (this was of course done to avoid the problem of models' feet getting covered in a layer of sand and flock which I had encountered with my first attempts at basing many years earlier). But it also meant that when the basing supplies finally did arrive it required another month or so of going back and individually basing all the models one by one, which ended up almost doubling their time to completion.
By the end of it I was utterly burnt out on painting Warhammer models. But I also had my first ever ranked unit of troops.
Doubtless you will immediately note the hooded heads. As I mentioned in the last episode all the archers in the army, both Scouts and Glade Guard, use the hooded heads that come on the Glade Guard sprue. This is because I had been playing hundreds of hours of Diablo III as a Demon Hunter and loved every second of it, and wanted to play Warhammer with an army of hooded rogues carrying missile weapons. Seeing the first ranked mass of hooded cloaked elf rogues put together was all the vindication I needed for my proof of concept.
Having looked at the various unit options at my disposal and worked out what ones I wanted to use most of all, I had already settled on a core of no fewer than four Glade Guard regiments. This was a good mirror of the four Troops units that were a common fixture of the small 2000 point Warhammer 40,000 armies I was already familiar with, had a nice visual symmetry and seemed like a nice round number of basic troop units to hang other stuff off. What's really important at this stage however, is that it was very quickly apparent that this was also a perfect number to theme each Glade Guard unit around a different season - four Wood Elf archer kinbands, four seasons, it all lined up perfectly.
Having looked at the various tactica guides I had... been told that most of the stuff I liked most was a pile of oozing hot shit garbage and that I was a shit munching limpdick baby who should kill himself for bothering with it at all and honestly was a nancyboy fake fan for not just investing in a bunch of manly meatbread guzzling Chaos Warriors and a Bolt Thrower album instead. Because apparently there were only three Warhammer factions that you were allowed to like, and the rest all just existed to have mean things written about them. And that pattern repeated down to the scale of army 'builds' within each faction too. That was what the Warhammer Khomunohteh was like in 2013. Who am I kidding that's what it's still like in most parts today too.
But I digress. I had also learnt amongst the digital jock posturing that one very good combination for a Wood Elf army was a unit of Glade Guard joined by a Spellweaver with a Resplendence of Luminescents. This gave the wizard a unit to hide in, and the Luminescents made the archers' shooting attacks inflict Magical damage, and the range of a lot of the Spellweaver's magic spells were about the same distance as the range the Glade Guard wanted to be at when shooting stuff, so it was a nice symbiosis all around.
I already wanted a bunch of Glade Guard, and I also already knew I wanted a Spellweaver, and I did like the sound of the Resplendence of Luminescents because the name Luminescents sounds a lot like the name Evanescence and I was finally starting to become more open about loving that band after years of keeping that to my chest in high school. And it resulted in my Glade Guard shooting Enchanted Arrows dealing Arcane Damage! HELLS YES!
So it did not take much convincing to get me on board for that particular photocopy special.
But the most crucial part of all this is it brought me to the first role of one of these Glade Guard units - a regiment of bodyguards to watch over and protect my mages as they travelled the land getting into adventures.
Painting my first ever ranked Warhammer unit also meant painting my first ever command group.
This was a daunting prospect inside the already daunting prospect of doing justice to such beautiful model sculpts. The first challenge was in getting in one of the Spites that came on the sprue as a base doodad. Initial mockups quickly showed that the Spite would not fit with the Champion on the same base, so it ended up getting moved to the archer next to the Champion, placed so that it was still adjacent to the unit leader.
The Lord's Bowman herself was scary to work on but ultimately became a very successful experiment. She made use of all of the fancy Champion bitz, and while experimenting with placement to fit her billowing cloak in amongst the rest of the unit, I stumbled upon the idea of standing her atop two leaves to both give some extra presence and some extra clearance for the Spite that slips in under her bow arm.
The biggest challenge of all, however, was the standard bearer.
Up until this point my experience with adding markings was almost entirely based on transfer decals. I had made precisely one single attempt to freehand unit markings on some of my Tau, and the results were so crude and ungainly that I immediately swore off ever trying to add them again and stuck exclusively to decals moving forward. But to my horror I discovered that there was no GW decal sheet for Wood Elves, meaning that all of those delicate intricate elven runes and pseudo-Celtic border braids on the GW studio banners were in fact freehanded and my only chance at replicating them was to somehow freehand them myself.
The first attempts tested out the method that would become standard for freehanding all my Wood Elf banners - blocking out the basic outline shape in white (for maximum visibility against the dark green background), then filling over it with black, and then finally painting in the actual details with gold leaving a black border. There were numerous points where the whole thing was wiped and started over from scratch, but eventually I reached a point where the end result was at last acceptable.
The banner here would become a typical example of all my Glade Guard banners, and is divided into three main parts. The first part, the top flag, has most of the elven runes on it - for this one I carefully selected some elven runes from the Magic Item section of the army book based on which ones I planned to use on the Battle Standard Bearer so I could practice them here. This flag is also asymmetric, with only one side decorated because painting those tiny elven runes on one facing was difficult enough already.
The second section, the middle flag, is the most important for the unit because it is the middle flag that contains all of the unique iconography that identifies the unit. In this case there are a couple of extra elven runes, because I wanted the extra practice, some attempts at the infinity spirals that are the de facto faction logo for the Wood Elves, and the main icons themselves. Two are the same as would eventually go on the army Battle Standard (again done here as a practice run). Two mark the first pair of Nightwish shout-outs to be featured in the army. The rest are all fairy magic symbols; a flower, a butterfly, and a field of stars.
Finally, the bottom two flags were given what was supposed to be a lightning motif (lightning bolts being the classic magic effect after all), but never quite managed to live up to my original concept because I have never quite been able to draw or paint lightning properly.
This iconography then came back into contact with the growing concept for where my particular elves came from and the culture behind them, specifically the centre of magical knowhow in my woodland empire. This was beginning to shape into one of the more obscure Nightwish references in the army backstory.
By this point I had started to grow increasingly familiar with the online Nightwish Mythos and was fairly familiar with most of their album covers if not the songs contained within. And one of those album covers stuck out at me when it came to magic and fantasy. It was a simple piece, with none of the fancy paintings that were a staple of its sister albums. Instead it was a humble photograph, containing a lonely moon looking out across a lonely hill with a single lone tree on it, the whole thing lit up with a brilliant twilight sunset.
The album was Angels Fall First.
 |
| Shut up this could totally be in the middle of an enchanted wood I'm not listening to you I can't hear you |
The deep dark twilight sunset, the nearly full moon, the lone ancient tree on a desolate rise, the whole thing screamed faerie magic to me, and I knew that my Wood Elf wizards had to come from there.
Thus was born the Celestial Heath, at the heart of the Fey Glades in the Meadows of Heaven, and the home of Summer Lightning.
Summer Lightning
Deep within the Meadows of Heaven, just beyond the crystal pools of the Maiden Falls, lie the secret Fey Glades. They are mysterious otherworldly places, where nymphs dance with faerie sprites amongst gardens of flowers that shine with radiant colour amidst the gloom of the wood. At the very centre of the Fey Glades is a large clearing surrounding a single desolate hill, atop which stands an ancient lone tree. This is the Celestial Tree at the heart of the Celestial Heath, and from beneath its leaves one can read within the wheeling stars the ever-winding path of destiny with wondrous and terrible precision. At other times, when the green moon rises, its baleful light casts wonderous many-coloured auras across the sky above the Celestial Heath, and from their hues and pathways one can discern how the winds of magic are blowing across the world.
These attributes make the Celestial Tree a valuable site for any who wish to study the arcane way of magic, and so the area has drawn magi to it since the Meadows of Heaven were first settled by the elves. To this day the Fey Glades remain the focal point for arcane study and practice in the Meadows of Heaven, and most of the mages of that realm hail from there. The Asrai of the Fey Glades have a long tradition of supplying the rest of the Meadows of Heaven with skilled magic practitioners and by longstanding tradition the warrior kinbands of the Fey Glades and Celestial Heath are dedicated to their protection.
Summer Lightning has always been the largest of the warrior kinbands hailing from the Fey Glades, and was the only one to survive the terrible battles of Cyanathair's first invasion of Athel Loren. Since then the kinband has grown in size and incorporated numerous Asrai households into its fold, and today it can almost be considered a full kindred in its own right. All those elves dwelling within the Fey Glades who are bound to serve their part as Glade Guard are inducted into Summer Lightning, and collectively form a loose network of warrior kinbands united by a common home and common purpose. Each of these Summer Lightning kinbands is responsible for guarding the Spellsingers and Spellweavers from the same household they belong to, and the bonds of trust and kinship between each mage and their attendant guardians run very strong indeed.
Wood Elf mages are commonly tasked with acting as envoys to foreign lands, and the mages of the Meadows of Heaven are no exception. It falls to the Glade Guard of Summer Lightning to keep watch over them during these travels and ensure their safety while abroad, and because of this the warriors of Summer Lightning learn much of the world beyond Athel Loren. Though not as well-traveled as the Wood Wasps, most elves of Summer Lightning are nonetheless knowledgeable of at least a few corners of the world besides their own and often grow fluent in foreign languages and customs.
Where the warriors of Summer Lightning truly excel however is in knowledge of the arcane and especially in how to battle forces of magic and sorcery. They share much of the training and study of their mage kin (albeit applied to a more martial bent), and put it to use in understanding and fighting the magical enemies of the Meadows of Heaven, especially creatures born of unnatural powers such as malevolent sprits and daemons. Their studies extend to most magical creatures however, and most Summer Lightning Glade Guard have at least some understanding of how to face down nearly any given monster they might encounter in their adventures. This knowledge is put to especially deadly practice when their arrows are enchanted by the Luminescent Spites that are common to the Fey Glades and which readily befriend the elven mages from there.
The warriors of Summer Lightning make use of the same wargear as the other Glade Guard kinbands of the Meadows of Heaven, especially the legendary and much feared Glade Guard Longbow. Each Glade Guard warrior by tradition fashions their own longbow, so that it is perfectly matched to their own unique needs and fighting style. All such longbows share a common general design however, one which is heavier and bulkier than the cheaper Scout Bow but offers much greater stopping power at close range, able to match a dwarf crossbow in punch while being more precise and manoeuvrable, making it ideal for use in direct battle.
As well as their traditional longbows Summer Lightning warriors carry elven fighting knives and short swords common to all the Glade Guard of the Meadows of Heaven, and are trained to be as proficient in hand to hand combat as they are at archery. Also in common with much of the warriors of the Meadows of Heaven they wear hooded cloaks of Lauralinae, enchanted to keep out rain, keep in warmth, breathe away summer heat, blend with foliage and snow and to never snag or tear. The banners they fight under are also fashioned of Lauralinae, to make them easy to craft and repair and so that they can be draped across branches and camouflaged amongst the trees when the kinband is hiding or waiting in ambush. Finally in common with many of the other warriors of the Meadows of Heaven Summer Lightning Glade Guard wear comfortable yet sturdy wearing leather boots and gloves and frequently collect valuable items and treasure while travelling in their adventures.
In the years since then the Glade Guard of Summer Lightning have had a fairly solid career across numerous battles and generally making a good name for themselves. True to their backstory even when they fumble all their shooting attacks they usually make up for it by shredding whatever it was they were shooting at in melee, and recently have begun to rake up a fairly impressive count of slain monsters (no less than two Giants*, two Trolls and an Ogre or two). They also have an excellent track record of keeping their attendant Spellweaver alive - but she is a story for another day...
*one of these 'giants' was actually a pair of giant Mangler Squigs, but I no longer remember if they were being used as a Giant or actual Mangler Squigs and since I'm a 6th edition Oldhamerer I decided to err on listing them as a second Giant. Still an impressive feat either way.
