Swords, Boards and Square Bases

Christmas 2003 was where it all started, really. I'd had Warhammer Fantasy Battle bits and bobs before, playing a handful of games with starter set materials or the Chaos Warriors I'd collected because a 3000 point army could be had for a hundred quid (if you spent a quarter of it on a Greater Daemon, and you didn't mind losing a lot). Then the vast majority of it had been car-booted under the auspice of grandparental authority and concern about examinations. 1 This, though: this was the year that I had beer money . I'd just turned eighteen, started my first job as a weekend bartender, and didn't have many vices other than goth girls and Jaffa Cakes. And on a beer money budget, in 2004, things were possible. Like, say, slow-growing a Warhammer Fantasy Battle army. I've been trying to work out why I made the choices I did. I thought it was the White Dwarf article on the Army of Sylvania that influenced me, but a quick fact check shows that came out in March of th...

It's no bad thing that Warhammer Fantasy Battles is back, in congealed and collated post-facto final form, a sort of "best of" the rules for the original game that so far seems to draw on third, seventh and a little bit of eighth edition (you can have a little bit of eighth, as a treat). It's also no bad thing that the Tomb Kings (and Bretonnians, I suppose) are back in production. Eighth edition Warhammer had the misfortune to appear during a time of murderous austerity, and a public servant like what I was at the time couldn't spring for a shiny new Necrosphinx no matter how pretty the figure was. But my very favourite thing about The Old World is that I don't have to come along on Mister Workshop's Wild Ride if I don't want to. The studio has decided that the Vampire Counts are a done deal, with Mannfred left for dead at Hel Fenn... and that's when my own personal Vampire Lord's unlife starts to get interesting. There's a convenient inte...

Darkness, save the distant starlight. Silence, save the susurrus of the dunes. Such is night in the Land of the Dead; empty of life, empty of light. Yet not, it must be recalled, empty of intent. If something should disturb the moonless emptiness – something that arcs across the heavens, bleaching the sands white in a false dawn, something that one imagines shrieking, even across the void that devours all sound – there are no eyes that will turn to the heavens. No eyes, but sockets in plenty. So it was that the passing of a twin-tailed comet was noted by the diviners of the High Queen of Lybaras. So it was that the scrolls were consulted – the more recent scrolls, those telling of the Reign of Millions of Years, and not the true history of Nehekhera-that-was-in-the-long-ago. So it was that a portent was recognised, considered, and understood. The last time this happened, the nemesis of the usurper and defiler was born far to the north; the fate of Nagash to perish ...

“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...