The Gaming Kingdom

So in something of a follow up to last week?s column I thought I could write about one of my favourite parts of the Wargaming hobby.  Starting a new army.

I don't mean going out and buying a cart full of models and working on your army list, although this is an important part of starting a new army.  I mean the time you spend thinking about what army you want to do.  The cunning plans that form while you should be thinking about something else.  The conversion and background ideas you come up with and how you fit it in to whatever gaming universe it happens to belong in.

My first real memory of doing this properly was when I was about 14.  Like many young lads I had a paper round to supplement my ?1.50 a week pocket money and all in was taking home about ?50 a month.

The paper round was for one of the free papers that had to be delivered to every house on an estate and I used to spend about 2-3 hours on the Thursday and Friday delivering it.

Most of the time I would spend planning an Undead army for Warhammer Fantasy and come up with cunning combos and run the math of different scenarios through may head.  This combined with planning how to budget for buying said army used to while away the hours and this paten has continued through most of my working life.

I am blessed now to have a job that is interesting when I am busy but that provides me with the time to think about these things (and write articles to post on the internet) when it is quiet.  So in between the spates of activity what have I been planning?  Well much like everybody else I have been looking at the new Space Marine codex.

I started off by looking at the colour section and looking at the pretty models.  This was followed by the army list section to see what was 'beardy' and what had been 'nerfed' and it was about this time that the inevitable thoughts of cool armies start to form.  First off I was good and thought about getting a couple of drop pods for my Dark Angels and sticking with those.  I have always liked the Dark Angels and have a good enough win record with them and even managed to do well at a recent tournament with my fluffy list.

These thoughts though just did not satisfy the hunger inside.  You all know what I am talking about, as much as you like an army you are working on it is just not as good as the next army you could be working on.  This was not helped by the fact that I had just gone back to reading Brothers of the Snake by Dan Abnett.  I had put the book down a few months ago as I had hit a bit of a wall with it but had recently picked it back up to get it finished.  So my head was filled with thoughts of Iron Snakes and then my Imperial Armour Vol 6 arrived with the updated rules for Red Scorpions and there Apothecarys in squads.  It was like a sign surely I should be doing an Iron Snakes army, they all have Apothecarys in squads too you know.

Fortunately this plan was halted quite quickly as I knew one of my friends was already painting up some Iron Snakes, anyway who needs to do a Chapter from a book when the local Games Workshop is running a Chapter Founding competition?

Not me that?s for sure, so again I sat down and thought up some ideas wrote up their background in two drafts, the first is the one to be handed in as part of the competition and the second contained all of the chapter's secrets and other characteristics that 'outsiders' wouldn't know.  So after a quick trip to Dawn of War's army painter the Storm Knights were born.  As I like a challenge I came up with some interesting self imposed restrictions to do with the chapter organisation and wrote up some an army list.

It was whilst writing up the army list for the Storm Knights that I noticed the rules for Shrike and the Raven Guard.  Now here was an army I could get onboard with.  Fleet Space Marines for the win, sorry Fleet Space Marines with Jump Packs for the win.

So which idea am I doing?

At the moment none of them.  I am painting my Flames of War Australians but they are all stored for use in the future and one day the Storm Knights may just be drop pod assaulting a planet near you, well them or the Raven Guard of course or did I hear that the new Chaos Army Book is out soon?

Kris