Badlands start treating us good - my Orcs & Goblins army

The Badlands sang by The Boss (clearly an Orc&roll star, given his strength derivated from his Greenskin heritage) are home of multiple Orcs & Goblins tribes, and mine is no exception. During this fifteen years of hobby, my first army grew costantly and is still growing; we played numerous battles, we lost a very lot of them but always with an Orcish grin on our green face, and the will to take our victory in another, glorious slaughter.

With the release of Warhammer: The Old World (from now on WTOW), I take the chance to make and inventory of my Greenskin miniatures. I think they're the army of which I have more miniatures; however, as you'll see, I didn't paint pretty much anything of it yet. Maybe the future will se my Orcs all painted on the table: it would be an awesome view! Something still need to be build, also: this is one of my goals for the 15th Year Hobby Celebration.

Well, time to go.

Waaagh! Alfray

Da best Waaagh! since Gorbad. Est. 2009

The road to The Old World - So it begins

 The Old World is finally here!

Alfray ready to dominate the new rules!

This afternoon I took my own copy of the new rulebook, a blue tome after a lot of red ones. I’m very excited! I’m still waiting for my copy of Ravening Hordes, the book with the army lists for the evil armies: I play three out of four of the armies inside (Greenskins, Warriors of Chaos and Beastmen; the fourth army is the Tomb Kings of Khemri, which Grimbeorn just purchased with this new edition), so I absolutely needed it.

A screenshot from the detailed unboxing Grimbeorn sent to Michele and me. You can see his proud paw on the prey

During the next days I’m gonna go deep inside the new rules, and Grimbeorn and I are already planning our first game. But the first thing I intend to do is a serious inventory of my Orcs and Goblins. A lot of miniatures still need to be built, and the majority is unpainted, but that’s not a problem: here in the Badlands even the grey armies fight an unrelenting combat against the other forces of the Old World…

All my Greenskins ready to be listed. The cradle on the left is for the Wyvern

Last thing to say, it was announced that Cubicle7, current publishers of WFRP 4th edition, is developing a new ruleset based on the The Old World setting. To cite Michele:

Did we need it? No. 

Will we buy it? Maybe. 

Will we go on playing WFRP 4th ed.? Obviously.

The official annoucement

I look forward to a great year of hobby! The road’s just starting, and the road goes ever on and on for fifteen years now: and whither then? I cannot say.

The road to The Old World - Bad Boys

It’s almost here! My second post while waiting for The Old World is about my Warriors of Chaos.

Do you remember this guy?

During last week I made an inventory of my Warhammer Chaos miniatures. It’s an army I love, but in which never really dipped; so, I don’t have lots of miniatures. However, they are one of the first armies I ever saw, because in the Crown of Fate campaign they were Michele’s army (I played Orcs and Goblins and Grimbeorn played The Empire: those two are our main armies ever since). I soon learned to fear Chaos Knights even when they were just five models; I’ve seen Michele’s character ascend to Demon Prince during a crucial battle by gaining the favor of the Chaos Gods; the silent and statuary units of Warriors scourged the battlefield in a way my Boyz and Grimbeorn’s State Troops could only imagine to reach.

Not a long time after, I bought a box of Chaos Warriors. I remember building them while on vacation with my parents somewhere in Tuscany, I was in high school at that time so a long time ago. Well, among them there was (and there still is) a particular miniature I love. I never bought any true Hero miniature for this army, so I needed a Hero to use on the battlefield, because at the time we were planning a new campaign and I wanted to play Warriors of Chaos.

His name was Thorgar.

Here he is! As you can see I chose a grey paint scheme for him... after all this years...

He's a "simple" Champion from the Warriors of Chaos old sprue, but at the time I sawed some horns from his friends' helmets and added some tentacles and mutations to him. I always loved this early idea of mine, and I'm really affectionate to this miniature even if it's just the product of the imagination of a proud young wargamer... or maybe because of that!

Well, Thorgar guided my Chaos troops in various battles. I remember at least two brief campaigns we started (and, I think, never completed): in one of them we had to conquer some territories on a map, and the second was something like a Mordheim campaign (we first tried Mordheim just some years after we were into Warhammer hobby). I have all my notes as well from that time.

Have you seen the first pic in this post? This is not random: the name Thorgar is obviously borrowed from Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, the fantastic videogame I literally consumed. Thorgar the Blooded One was his original name (in Italian it was Thorgar il Purosangue). I loved the game and the plot, and I chose the same name for my Hero. Just look at the epic trailer here: the best description of the Warhammer world.

Even if I never painted him, I often chose a Mark of Chaos (obviously) for him in battle. In my first times gaming, my favourite was the Mark of Nurgle, because at the time (and I think even in more recent editions) it gave -1 to hit and to wound to enemies in close combat: a treat! This granted him a title, because every Champion of Chaos needs a title. But my Thorgar was only on the way of becoming a real Champion, so he wanted to call himself Thorgar the Unclean... but I was called Thorgar the Almost Unclean (Thorgar il Quasi Immondo, in Italian). Not really noble, but me and the guys always called him that and he still has this name today. Poor Thorgar, I really need to paint him.

During the last few year, Grimbeorn and I started lots of little campaigns just for the sake of gaming. I'm often the master, but in one of them I'm just an humble player and Thorgar is my character: the Thorgar Campaign started at least in 2016, I think, and it's still on today. Sometimes we play a game to narrate the violent deeds of Thorgar in Norsca, where he wants to become the new Champion of the Gods and defeat an Imperial army settled near the Sea of Claws. In this story, even if I always loved Nurgle (I possess a Death Guard army for Warhammer 40k, too), Thorgar is a servant of my favourite Chaos God: Tzeentch. Tzeentch is always the main evil force in all my WFRP campaigns, he's the bad guy in Wolf of Vengeance: is the true power of Chaos, in my opinion and taste.

So, in The Old World Thorgar is ready to return to the battlefield with is little but capable army. I don't have lots of miniatures, as I already said, but fortunately the new rules allow Allied and Mercenary contingents, so I can deploy my Beastmen alongside my Warriors of Chaos. This week I took few pics of what I've done.

My Warriors, magnetised in their box. Here you can see my Chaos Sorcerer (I want to paint the base before glueing him), some Warhounds, the Gorebeast from the Chaos Chariot that I use as a filler. I also have the Chariot, obviously, a Demon Prince, the other 5 Warhounds still in sprue and some Marauders I'm building these days. I never painted anything from this army, a part from a pair of Warriors you can se in the last rank, who were just a color try

First ever Marauders I built. I've always loved this miniatures, and I'm just finishing the others. However I want to leave on the sprue 4 or 5 of them, because I'm planning a Norsca Warband for Mordheim in the near future and I want to keep some minis for it

Thanks to Andrea, one of the friends from our club, I possess this magnificent old Chaos Ogres Command. I love old metal miniatures, and they're just a step toward the only old miniatures I really, really, really want to collect... old Chaos Dragon Ogres. I look forward to a time when I will deploy them on the battlefield!

Tomorrow, the Chaos war drums will sound in The Old World!

The road to The Old World - The Hero

First post for 2024! Oh yeah. And it's written under the twin tailed comet, since the day after tomorrow marks the release of The Old World by GW. Warhammer Fantasy is back under a new skin, and I can't be more excited for it.

This 2024 marks also the 15th Year Hobby Celebration for us, an event between Grimbeorn, Michele and me to celebrate our start with Warhammer hobby back in 2009. Since Michele is in Rome, Grimbeorn and I are gonna carry on the flag by playing a new version of our first ever Warhammer Fantasy Battle campaign.

With The Old World out, I'm gonna take care of my Warhammer armies, define my square bases, fill up my ranks and so on. Only three days stand between me and the new books and rules, so I'm gonna share something related every day.

* * *

The first thing I did was take out my first Orc Hero. In 2009 I started playing with my beloved Greenskins, and the first box I bought obviously was a Orc Boyz box. Their Champion was my first Hero ever, since I played him as my character during out first campaign, named The Crown of Fate (La Corona del Fato in Italian), mastered by the former common friend that introduced us to Warhammer.

His name was, and still is, Alfray Zpakkakrani (in English: Alfray Skullcrusher, probably a more Orcish Skullkrusha or something like that).

This was also one of the first miniatures I painted. This year, since the 15th Year Hobby Celebration is on, is my intention to restore him and renew the paint job.

With Alfray I played my very first two Warhammer Fantasy campaigns during 2009. Just at the end of The Crown of Fate my character fell in the Sea of Claws after losing the final battle between Grimbeorn, Michele and me (Grimbeorn won that campaign), and was rescued by some Norsemen, who took him to see an emissary of Malal, the fifth God of Chaos, the one representing Chaos himself. The deity hired Alfray to become his new champion, a sort of new Kaleb Daark (a former GW character, a powerful Chaos Champion and the only known Malalite hero. You can find something about him here). We started another campaign with our old characters one year after: we loved them! And our armies grew alongside them while we became more and more attracted to the hobby.

I still have all my notes and army lists from that time. A nice memory!

I always use this miniature to represent my heroes: both Gorthul the Red Orc from the Wolf of Vengeance campaign and Okog the Nazty, my Mordheim Orc character, are the same model for now. I really love this Orc, so my future work on the paint job must be something right to bring honour to his story.

So, 2024 is the year of the great return of Alfray Zpakkakrani on the battlefield. The road to The Old World begins with the first green step...

PS: maybe someone noticed that the name Alfray is taken from the series Orcs by Stan Nicholls. Three novels I read in 2009 just when I started playing Warhammer and that I immediately appreciated, as you can see...