The ultimate dungeon monsters - the Skaven. Yesyes!

There's something about the Chaos ratmen, Skaven, that makes them perfect antagonists in a Warhammer dungeon adventure. Dungeons are dark, damp and scary places that'd be filled with rats in any case, underground nests being their natural habitat when they aren't lurking about on riverbanks or rifling through my recycling bins. It makes sense that they'd be there, hatching cunning and cruel plots deep beneath the earth.

Furthermore, they aren't derived ultimately from Tolkien or Moorcock so they feel distinctly "Warhammer". Also very typical of early days Warhammer is the Skaven's mix of humour and horror. The idea of an evil "ratman" speaking in Queekish is inherently absurd/funny/cute.

Their mythic origin story seems deeply inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, particularly The Doom That Came to Sarnath. It's perfectly pitched in a "legend has it" style, combined with the fact that the Skaven's existence is generally considered a mere fairytale in the Empire itself.

Anyway, I could write more (a lot more), but for the moment I want to focus on my own initial steps into the kingdom of rats. 

My test subject Warhammer Quest Skaven painted in unlikely royal purple.

Before I regained a copy of Advanced Heroquest (thanks for the overwhelming Christmas present last year, Kitty), I still had my copy of Warhammer Quest, which was Advanced Heroquest's handsome son. Inside were twelve Skaven warriors, pretty similar to the older plastic Skaven pose-wise, but more detailed, more armoured and slightly less hunched over. In fact, as time went on, Skaven miniatures became less and less hunched over, more upright and stronger looking until they resembled muscular monkeys. Which is why everyone knows "manthing JesGoodwin" made the best, most Skaveny Skaven in the 80s and early/mid 90s.

Above you can see my initial painting test subject, Mister Scritchstink. Looking back through old copies of White Dwarf, and indeed, the dark memory cellars of my mind, it was apparent that the hands and feet of Skaven were generally painted flesh coloured, somewhat akin to the pink extremities of real rats. As you can see, I only made a subtle gesture towards that on my first Skaven because the first attempt with fleshy colours looked stupid to my mind. The ears at least should have been fleshy pink though. 

Clothes for rats. I can't imagine that Skaven have tailors, nor a textile industry. But who then makes their attire? Particularly as it all looks fairly uniform and stylistic, a sort of comfy quasi-Medieval outfit of tunic and liripipe. Probably it's best not to think about these things too much, similar to how we ought to ignore Tolkien's orcs talking about a "menu", with the implication that orcish restaurants exist.

Well, maybe Skaven stage regular hold-ups of travelling clothing merchants or something. In any case, I painted Scritchstink with a purple outfit, in keeping with the mid-90s feeling of the model. Really the liripipe should be a different colour to the tunic underneath, but this guy just likes purple a lot, alright? As for purple, it's a very unlikely colour really, purple being the most uncommon colour for textiles due to the rarity, and therefore cost, of the necessary dye. Hence why it was more or less exclusive to royalty. I believe at one point in the Middle-ages it was even forbidden by law for commoners to wear it. 

But, we're talking here about Warhammer, maybe Scritchstink is a regicide with a penchant for stealing clothes, I don't know. And purple contrasts nicely with the otherwise natural colours. That being said, I decided to paint the Advanced Heroquest Skaven in less flamboyant clothing.

Look how hunched they are. I think later sculptors mistook "hunch" for "hench".

It's weird in some ways that Skaven were the main antagonists for Advanced Heroquest, they don't even appear on the main box art. The painting, a somewhat more cartoonish version of the MB Games Heroquest art by Les Edwards, was clearly made to the same brief. I guess there were various commercial reasons why that was so, but nevertheless it felt a bit odd.   

Nonetheless, ecstatic with my new copy of AHQ (yes, by now it's a bit tiring writing the full name each time), I set about painting the included monopose warriors. As you can see, this time the bases were painted a brownish colour to better match the AHQ room and corridor tiles. These models have softer detail than the WHQ version but are still fun and simple to paint. 

I haven't yet painted the full horde, simply because I don't need to. The original idea outlined in the rulebook was to use different colour bases to represent the different Skaven, the sentries, champions and so on. But because I have adult money these days I've sought out proper models for those more specialist types. More on that in a later post. The remaining Skaven I've decided to paint as Clan Pestilens warriors for specific scenarios. More on that later, too.

As mentioned earlier, I went for a more subdued, natural and earthy colour palette for these, adding some brighter colour here and there on the shields for a bit of contrast. I think they look rather nice and give me the grimy, stinking Old World feelings that I crave.

More ratty shenanigans next time, manthings!

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.