Swords, Boards and Square Bases

“Hel Fenn?” Lord Ruthven said to me. “My dear boy, everyone who’s anyone says they were at Hel Fenn. There are scions of our line barely out of their grave who’ll tell you they remember it like it was yesterday.” “Do you?” I asked. “History will tell you,” said Lord Ruthven, “that I was nowhere near the place; that it was Adolphus Krieger who stood with Mannfred at the last, while I was derelict in my duties to my lord and still mourning my fair Emmanuelle.” History, I reflected, is written by the winners; and history is very clear that at Hel Fenn, the house of von Carstein came off the worse… But history, I also reflected, is frequently a lot of old cobblers.   I wasn't supposed to be here. In 2019 I retired my Vampire Counts army as too brittle in the joints and too scuffed in the paintwork to survive another tour of duty. I'd played one last big exhibition game with them, and one last regular-joe ham-slam with my longest serving opponent, and that was that. Never s