"This is a Gargoyle"... or is it a Bloodthirster?

In a game where the very Games Workshop specific Fimir trod the cold floor tiles of HeroQuest dungeons, it always seemed a bit odd that a Bloodthirster model was used to represent a more generic "gargoyle". I suppose it's very feasible that an Old World gargoyle might have been carved in the form of a demon by some master mason. But why not just have the Bloodthirster as the big baddie? Had the designer stated he wanted a gargoyle model and GW just plumped for the nearest design they had that could pass for one? Why then did Mike McVey paint the (prototype) gargoyle model as a flesh and blood Bloodthirster rather than the stone monster as seen on the artwork for the Kellar's Keep quest pack? 

Anyway, here is my recent attempt at painting this venerable model for use in Advanced Heroquest. I mean, he features prominently on the box artwork and inside the rulebook, so it simply had to be this exact model. Now, I'll admit to being somewhat loath to remove him from his original HeroQuest base, but luckily I actually own two gargoyles. So, I felt less like a desecrator of my own childhood as I carefully cut and filed away that familiar HeroQuest base of grey plastic.

The Bloodthirster, having a nice big yawn and stretch after a good night's sleep.

This would be the third time I'd painted a HeroQuest gargoyle. My dad had painted it originally, taking leave of Mike McVey's colour schemes for once, and left it mainly grey plastic to represent the stone but with enamel black, silver and bronze for a few bits and pieces of armour and weapons, red for eyes and so on. 

Later I painted the second gargoyle in garish acrylics, then later still borrowed its head to stick on the front of a Chaos Rhino for 2nd edition 40k. I also attached the wings to the back of a Chaos Space Marine in place of a backpack.

Rogue Trader Predator I turned into a Rhino for some reason. The old HeroQuest gargoyle head is in pride of place. It's hard to imagine even a single World Eater Marine fitting inside it.

Even later, I repainted my dad's old gargoyle with my then improved standard of painting, but once again like a stone statue. And finally, I rescued the head and wings from my mothballed Chaos Space Marine army, put it all back together, stripped it and painted it in its now final form. Probably final anyway. My gargoyles have had busy lives.

And this time, seeing as I planned to use it as an actual Bloodthirster, he ended up in classic Khornate red, bronze and black. I was particularly pleased with its mouth, the warm, wet and bloody feel (oops, nearly got possessed by Slaanesh then) achieved mainly by adding a wash of red ink over the top. 

So how did I end up with two gargoyles then? Far back in faded days, I was on holiday somewhere or other with my family, and in a toy shop I spotted a single copy of Against The Ogre Horde buried on a stacked shelf. I was excited to see it and had no idea that such a thing existed. The box was also enticingly bigger than the previous two quest packs.

As an aside, it was the only time I ever saw Against The Ogre Horde for sale anywhere. Likewise, I only ever saw the Eldar expansion for Space Crusade on a single occasion. I didn't buy it though (or beg my parents to buy it, more like) because I was already much more into 40k itself by that point.

So, obviously I bought Against The Ogre Horde immediately, didn't I? No, I didn't. For some reason it was only afterwards that I asked my parents if we could return to the shop to buy it. I had to wait until the very last day of the holiday before we did so, and for all that time I was increasingly worried that someone else would have bought it. But it was still there! I spent the journey home thinking happily about painting the ogre models and all the rest.  

Unfortunately, after I'd opened the box at home I found that the quest book was missing. Disaster! I handwrote a letter to MB Games explaining my plight (and I remember distinctly using the melodramatic phrase "to my horror I found the quest book was missing") and my mum sent it off in the post. 

As difficult as it is to imagine nowadays, in the early 90s you might expect a response to a letter or order placed via a catalogue to arrive some weeks after sending, if you were lucky. If you remember disclaimers like "please allow 28 days for delivery" then you're likely of my generation. Sure enough, a few weeks later a package arrived for me from MB Games. Not only was the quest book included, but also several sprues of extra monsters and furniture! This was great because I had the Adventure Design Kit and could now go further in my quest to fill every square of the board with a monster, as is the right of every HeroQuest player (hi Bard).

So that's how I came to be the proud owner of two gargoyles. We found that the ogre quest itself was really tough and perhaps not up to the standard of the previous quest packs. I don't believe we ever finished it. Additionally, after encountering the infamous quest with the error in it, meaning the quest couldn't be completed unless you fudged it, I genuinely began to believe that the quest book had been quickly cobbled together in a panic by some MB Games employee just for my benefit. Kids, eh? 

Everyone's sick with the plague

It was my dad who painted all the miniatures for our games back in the day. With a white spirits filled egg-cup and enamel paints left over from his model aircraft days, he'd somehow paint entire sets of models in a single evening while I was in bed. I'd come down in the morning and find them lined up on top of the TV or on the sideboard.

He painted all of the miniatures from Heroquest (including the furniture), Space Crusade, Battle Masters and Advanced Heroquest. And he did that so quickly that we could pretty much start playing with fully painted models right from the start. That's quite an achievement in my book, and it added a lot to the enjoyment of the games. 

His paint palette from those days also continues to inspire my own painting style. Limited as he was by the colours he had available for military aircraft and 1:72 scale WW2 infantry, orcs ended up with olive drab skin and dull muddy brown tunics. And... they looked great for it. Of course, he was more or less following Mike McVey's painted examples around the sides of the box, but my dad's orcs in particular, with their dull colours and darker flesh looked proper mean and evil, dirty and filthy like they should be.  

Warhammer Quest orc archer, inspired by my dad's colour scheme.

Above you can see a recent-ish painted example of a Warhammer Quest orc which I painted in a similar set of tones to my dad's original models. Note the clear ancestry of this miniature descending from the Heroquest orc figures. Except that instead of crude (and no doubt very smelly) footwraps, this dude has Doc Martens on. By this point, Citadel's fantasy orcs had started changing overtly into thuggish "bovver boys". It's quite amusing I guess, but not to my taste to be honest. Today, Warhammer orcs have long since become blown-up caricatures of themselves (and they were already caricatures of "traditional" orcs to begin with) and I hate them. Sorry. But seriously, a modern orc's chin alone is bigger than one of Kev Adams's old orcs and has none of the cheeky malice or character. 

Moving on though, a note here on eyes, which brings me to the main subject of this post, sort of.

Back when my dad was working feverishly on the Skaven for Advanced Heroquest, he opted for painting them with yellow eyes. An interesting choice, and looked really good actually. Very animal-like. However, it's a proven fact that evil creatures have red eyes, without exception. The exception that proves the rule was my childhood cat, Tabby. He had green eyes, but, and I have to say this, even by cat standards he really was an evil little shit.

Tabby the twat cat. No photo of him exists where he wasn't genuinely and terrifyingly angry.

So, I departed from my dad's colour scheme there and went for red eyes for my Skaven, as is only true and proper. But again, my dad's Skaven were painted in the same old military enamels, and it's primarily this that inspired my feelings about what Skaven should look like. Mainly dark and grubby.

I mentioned in a previous post not liking how my Skaven looked with ratty flesh-coloured hands and feet, but for plague infected ratscum, I thought it might look nice if their fur had started falling out or something. So experimentally, I tried this on a plague censer bearer. Annoyingly, it looked really good and made me wish I'd done it for the other Skaven too. Especially as I painted a couple of plague related Skaven prior to this one. Oh well.

Only two of these rats are true plague worshippers, but the Night Runner on the right has a slight cold, so it's all good.

I have to say I was pretty pleased with the warpscroll in particular. It required the use of what my partner calls my "spider's foot" paintbrush. I'll leave you for now with the wise words of Trey Azagthoth from Morbid Angel, because it's extremely "Oldhammer". I just made a couple of appropriate corrections to an otherwise perfect lyric.

I call forth the (horned rat /ed)
I call forth the lord of plague

I am of the lost (and damned /ed)

Creatures of spawn of hate

Rejoice in the heaving earth

Praise the ripping sky

Rise spread disease
Consume their puny souls

Obligatory introductory post(ory).

I've written a couple of so-called "blogs" in the past. They're long dead and buried in concrete like the ambulance from the Salisbury Novichok incident, or Jimmy Savile. You know, just in case.

Unlike those former attempts though, this one will last a bit longer probably. I have better things to be doing actually, but this'll keep my hand in on the old keyboard tapping. I need to because I'm getting rusty and want to finish my novel during my work lunchbreaks. 

At my author's alchemist workbench, I came up with the winning formula of boiling together A Wizard of Earthsea, The Lord of the Rings, adding essence of Roald Dahl, The Worst Witch and a few other bits and pieces. I don't think anyone else has done that yet. I'm making it really obnoxiously middle-class, too. Should make me millions.

At home though, I paint miniatures and play games. It's the usual story for someone my age, I'm afraid. Fed on a diet of 80s fantasy and science fiction TV, films, books, comics, music and general popular culture, I eventually ended up with a copy of Heroquest, probably in 1990 or something.  

Guess what happened next? I developed a chronic tabletop (if the living room floor counts as a "tabletop") gaming addiction and could often be found grimly shooting up with purest Chaos Black Citadel paint at every opportunity, pocket money / Christmas / birthday permitting. 

Then there were some years in the wilderness. I'll save writing about that for my autobiography, which I'll have published on Penguin Modern Classics. Not Penguin Classics, because unlike Morrissey I'm terribly modest.

On my return to Warhammering, I didn't much like what I saw. There was no atmosphere to anything anymore, all too slick and polished, impersonal, dull. Still, having a hankering once more for the sweet highs of fiddling around with little men and rolling dice, I found myself in possession of a new big box Games Workshop game - Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game. It was the Battle of Pellenor Fields box, to be precise.

Some of my MESBG elves, posing heroically in a dark wood for some reason.

The rest of GW's model output now looked more like a line of action figures than anything else, so MESBG (as we wisely prefer to call it) with its somewhat dated, realistically proportioned miniatures suited me.

Now, I've always been a "narrative player", the idea of competitive gaming had always been quite weird to me and was in any case not as common as it is today. It seemed like tabletop gaming had, while I was away, morphed into some analogue version of "e-sport" (a term I find ludicrous and embarrassing). There's nothing wrong with tournaments, but I'm not a fan of the fact that competitive gaming seems to be the default nowadays.

But whatever, I could play as I wanted despite what everyone else seemed to be doing. As good a game as MESBG is though, and it is really good, especially using the Battle Companies book, I felt slightly troubled.

"Troubled" is over-egging it, but being a serious Tolkien-ite I couldn't help feeling that my options for narrative playing with emphasis on one's own imagination and storytelling was limited by the setting. Being set in the Third Age of Middle-earth where the history is well documented meant that battles outside of the known timeline of events felt contrived and weird. My brain and my slavish adherence to avoiding the wrath of Tolkien's ghost is annoying like that.

Then I remembered I'd always been really into World War Two. WW2 was almost as ubiquitous as fantasy and science fiction as far as childhood cultural food went. Before I was pitching little orcs and barbarians against each other, I'd had all my dad's Airfix soldiers to boss around. So, I got into 2nd Edition Bolt Action.

Some of my Bolt Action Soviets, Sovieting and probably Unioning.

Bolt Action was, and is, really good fun. Thinking back to my youthful days of 2nd Edition Warhammer 40,000, I realised I'd never truly enjoyed playing the damn thing. And here I had two games that were genuinely enjoyable (maybe I was just too young back then for anything more complicated than Space Crusade). Something was missing though. Ultimately, I missed that vast Warhammer Old World of the 80s and early 90s. A rich world that served as a sandbox to have adventures of your own in. That Old World map had a lot of blank spaces to explore.

Amazingly I still had my copy of Warhammer Quest from 1995, but what was really beckoning to me from the depths of memory was Advanced Heroquest. A game I had received one Christmas long ago and never really played (too complicated for my puny developing mind to comprehend at the time). I'd lost my copy during the wilderness years, but I could still remember its somewhat cheap-looking black and white rulebook resembling nothing so much as a death metal fanzine, and the overall browniness of its components and box cover.

Here, I am Advanced Heroquesting. That T-junction won't work. Idiot.

It's not just nostalgia, at this point it's aesthetic preference. The feelings and mood conjured by listening to some rough death metal demo tape from the 80s with xeroxed cassette inlay just can't be reached by a shiny professionally produced digital album. You can actually smell it, feel it, taste it. A heavy atmosphere like incense. The same applies to games. 

Warhammer Quest is of course great, the massive Roleplay Book alone was unprecedented, fantastic! But Advanced Heroquest is very different, it's strangely dour, grimy. Death is ever-present. A place where orcs are skinny gangling creatures and would scorn a bright red axe-handle. I'd found my way to what everyone today calls "Oldhammer", and it is sheer magic.

So yes, I'm going to be writing about all of this shit. Probably some other stuff too. Cheers.