Sunday, November 1, 2009

A Timeframe

I would like to say that these first few posts are looking back at about 5 months time. I lurked about on Tom's Boring Mordheim Forum and Blog (which are by far not boring at all) and Mordheim in Montana (can this guy make terrain or what?) for a few months, learning tricks, reading posts and gathering ideas and inspiration. My first purchase was a box of empire militia. This gave me the start of my Reiklanders. Bit by bit and box by box my warbands started to come together. My Reiklanders are a combination of Militia, Empire handgunners/crossbowmen and Empire Spearmen. I added a Skaven night runner box with a rat ogre and my skaven warband was born. I look at the box sets to see how much of a warband I can make with one purchase. Next up was my Dwarven Treasure Hunters. I found one the old dwarf regiments box on clearance and viola they were born. After putting together several warbands and combing the forum for ideas I started on buildings again. This time it was with foam core. I was initially detracted by how difficult(read different) working with foamcore was. Remeber I knew nothing about scenery construction, but I was armed with alot of knowledge from the blog and forum so my attempts were not in vain! I made a few buildings and got comfortable with working with foamcore. I then began to crave the old standby buildings from the box set. Check out Tom' Boring Mordheim Forum under the heading of cardstock buildings and you can find much information that I was very pleased with!

From Failure to Insight

I actually got quite good at the graph paper/poster board buildings and in a weekend I cranked out 14 buildings of various heights, dimensions and level of damage. I had only a handful of zombie minis to gauge size and I was working from memory and a few Internet pics for inspiration. I had very little experience with scenery (except for folding up cardstock that came in the many boxed sets of GW stuff I bought), so I happily chugged along making buildings and feeling very confident I would be gaming soon (never mind I had no group yet). I happily took my most prized building (4 stories, 3 gangplanks and losta walls) out to the back steps to be primed. What a glorious sunny dry day it was. I had painted alot of minis and I knew this was one of those rare perfect paint days. I brought my favorite primer paint can up to the building and gently gave it a light spray. Of course all of you out there know what is coming don't you? The building literally melted away. The cardstock warped horribly and the graph paper peeled away like a banana peel. I stopped priming and watched my favorite building turn to a pile of rubble and not even a pile I could use! I lamented yet again. Back to the Internet for a bit more research. Man, I wished I had found these guys before I started making all those card buildings.
Tom's Boring Mordheim Blog and Mordheim in Montana. I skulked about on these sites and learned more than I knew existed. I also found that I was not the only Mordheim fanatic out there!

The Beginning of the Return


Let me add up the elements for you. I am married with three children, work a full time job, I am back in college for a third time (Masters Degree this time!) and have virtually no time or money for wargaming. There is no way I could rebuild my 40k armies (Oh I guess when I said my Mordheim stuff went missing I did not elaborate and say that ALL of my gaming stuff was gone), Battletech was no longer what I remembered and D&D 4th edition simply didn't work for me. Mordheim seemed a natural start. Smaller warbands meant less expenditure and from the online stores I found, bits were available for conversions. My online searches excited me and I wanted to get started RIGHT NOW! Unfortunately, money would not allow that to happen. Putting together my list of options I decided that I could try my hand at some scenery. If I could get some buildings together I would keep my interest high, not get discouraged and be making progress on my gaming desires. I went to a local craft store and bought some graph paper (for planning), some poster board (for the buildings), white glue, glue sticks and I was ready. The pis is an example of the first series of buildings I made. Graph paper design over a poster board building, supported by Popsicle sticks and lotsa glue. They looked great! Ummmm until the first base coat of paint hit them. I won't describe or show you the blob of goo that they became when I started the painting. Back to the Internet.

A Welcomed Return

Greetings to all! A long and arduous road has led me to this point. Way back in 1999 I purchased my first copy of Mordheim. I was enthralled by the skaven minis and the buildings were simply the most incredible boxed scenery I had ever seen. Within a month a bought a second set just to add more buildings to my table (it never occurred to me back then I could make them...). I simply loved this game. I spent every spare minute working on warbands( I had them all and as Town Cryer introduced more I had to have them too!), mounting the buildings on bases, playing as many games as I could, and in general just living for Mordheim. Well, as it will happen, life caught up with me. I returned to college, got married, had my 3 children and a respectable job. Now where did all of my Mordheim stuff go? Most of it simply disappeared over the years, I had a handful of minis left but the vast majority of my scenery, minis, rulebooks, town cryers were simply gone. I lamented for a good long time. After 3 long distance moves and a merging of two households I am sure they got tossed away. I came out of my lament determined to rebuild what I had. Of course after running an online search I found that this was not gonna be as easy as I had hoped. Almost all of my personal sources were out of buisiness or no longer played. This was gonna be harder than I had thought.......