Wargaming; - or how to maintain the addiction when one’s means are on the slender side.

By Anne Welborn, April 2003.

Of course I blame my kids, - they were the ones who got me hooked on Warhammer Fantasy Battles in the first place.  Only having handed out the blame I’m still left with the problem of how to continue to gather new armies to my banners now that I have a mortgage.  Oh I can remember the heady days when I put together my first High Elf army, going out and buying 18 metal unarmoured archers with full command at Games Workshop and handing over the folding without a care in the world.  I did that with most of my regiments, - Maiden Guard, Sword Masters, - not a problem to me at all back then.

Now that was when I didn’t have a MORTGAGE.   O ye stout hearted and brave, cower before the horrid curse of it .......  Yeah, a mortgage, amazing how the @%%$!!*  things soak up all that lovely cash that one could at one time spend on one’s hobbies.  So what do you do when you still want to play? - or in my case, - want to get more involved with playing now that my kids are at Uni in the South Island and I don’t see them so often. 

Another problem is that all my armies are devised for 5^th Edition  (O the most blessed and sacred 5^th Book, - the true and most precious revelation ....) and they don’t really fit 6^th Edition at all unless I go out and buy more model figures.   Which I can’t afford to do.  Bother!

I did rat about in my store cupboard to see what I could find that could be pressed into use.  Found various lovely OOP figures by Ral Rartha, Grenadier, Dixion etc etc as well as the odd 4^th Edition blister pack, - but not really enough in the way of Elves to bring my armies up to scratch.  Then like a fool I went and said I would play a 2000pt 6^th Edition game at the April meeting.   Crikey! – I only ever used to play 1000pt games with 5^th Edition; - and here I was putting my hand up for a seriously expanded army to be played by rules I had the only the vaguest notion about.  The rules don’t worry me so much truth be told, - because I know that if I DID do something wrong during the game somebody is bound to shriek out, ‘You can’t do that!’ – so that’s the rule changes nicely taken care of ..........  J

* Proxies, - or not?

……. Which left the actual troops to be considered.  Now I’ve never been one to go for the ‘Invisible Army’ method where you field empty bases and say these are Fast Cavalry with Light Armour, Shields, Spears, cut lunch, Full Command and the Banner of Hopeful Optimism.  And I don’t really like the other alternative either where you field (say) a bunch of what are plainly Hobbits with bows and make out that they are White Lions with big axes.

* A Cheap alternative ......

Soooooo what to do.  More ratting in my store cupboard turned up my large Mageknight Elemental League army; - not a terrible lot of use I thought to myself at first. 

Now here is a real lost cause, - Mageknight, - a damn fine game (in my opinion), - only most of the Rebellion figures that were first released were bloody horridly painted and strangely posed.  Careful re-painting could fix the first case, the second case is almost impossible to do anything about without major surgery.  The later Expansions tended to be a whole lot better since most of the models were styled after the old OOP Ral Partha figures, - and some of the figures were even reasonably well painted (!!!); - but of course by then it was too late for the game in New Zealand because people had already lost what little interest they’d had in Mageknight.  Sometimes I have wondered about actually offering to PAY folk to play Mageknight with me, but really I doubt if it’s worth the effort   (sigh).

After a little while my brain started working (grind of gears, ticking of clockwork) and I began to realise that the Elemental League was not so far away from being similar to the Wood Elves of Athel Loren.  Of course I couldn’t use the Trolls nor the big Sislith riding lizards (pity), but all the Elves, Unicorns, Centaurs, Sprites and various kinds of Tree-folk from the later Expansion packs would be just absolutely corker.  Rebasing is easy, - but you do need to take care not to cut your fingers off when removing Mageknight  figures from their bases, because they are %$#!!@* well stuck on.  It’s not so hard to obtain discounted Mageknight figures over the internet; - and they are CHEAP!   30-90 cents or so a figure if you look about on the web with a sacrifice to the Goddess Visa nice and handy and ready to be cast into the sacred portal.

* Back to the Toy Shop .... and whose got the $#@!!** Hairdryer now?

My other discovery is that almost any sort of animal, creature and insect is available to any size and to a variety of poses in the toy shops and $2.00 Shops.   Looking for mounts for Heros and others, - then look no further, - and again they are CHEAP.   

Now unlike most other plastic model figures, the figures for Mageknight are made from a lovely tough flexible plastic.  Where a Games Workshop plastic figure will snap, a Mageknight figure will simply bend and flex without damage.  And a few quick passes with a hair dryer and it’s dead easy to modify their poses.  Something more serious needed than mere resetting of limbs? – cutting, drilling and pinning with brass wire is an absolute doddle, quick, easy, no problems at all.   Five Minute Araldite is just the bee’s knees for gluing Mageknight figures by the way.  Combine $2.00 Shop creatures and Mageknight figures together and you’re onto a winner.  J  J  J

* Work is the Curse of the ........

I was doing so very well with sorting out my 2000pt 6^th Edition Elf army when things suddenly got frightfully busy at work.   Spare time disappeared altogether in the evenings due to me being too stuffed to do little more than fall asleep on the couch.  Isn’t it annoying how work always seems to get in the way of important stuff!! 

So it began to look like I might run out of time with getting my army ready  (Bother!).    What to do?

#1.  I could just field the balance of the unpainted and barely assembled figures alongside the completed and properly painted ones.

Or  #2.  I could use another CHEAP method of sorting myself out a nice army in order to aviod fielding unpainted figures.

Time will tell whether or not I’ll have my Feral Wood Elf army finished in time for the April meeting; - but even if I don’t I’ll still bring along the cheapest Elf army in the world with me.  My Silk Road Elves in glorious colour and printed on ........ (drum roll) ....... paper.

* Beware the Paper Tiger Grasshopper.

This is the cheapest and most flexible method of all when it comes to putting an army together.  Flat coloured images of troops printed on paper using an ink jet printer is the simplest and quickest way to rapidly create an army of any size.  And the one big advantage this method has over any other is that  the figures don’t need to be painted because they are the right colour already.   If you are thinking of trying out an army that you have never played before I can heartily recommend playing with a paper army first.  Nothing worse than to shell out hard earned cash for an army, then discover that you hate the way it plays.  I have a number of very nice printed paper elements for various DBA armies that have been mounted on foamboard and covered with clear plastic contact to give them some durability in handling.   These cost me virtually nothing and if I find that I can’t stand playing (say) a Moorish Army afterall it doesn’t matter if they do end up in the bin.

 Need another regiment of archers? - load the files and print them off.  Of course it does help if you are a bit of a whizz with a graphics program in drawing up the images in the first place, but even if you can’t draw to save your life there are plenty of excellent free sources and groups on the internet for paper troops.   There are some pay websites too that offer excellent armies to download, but these are still a bargin in my opinion because once you have the images you can print model figures in their hundreds of thousands if the mood is upon you.  J

* The Elves of the Silk Road.

Because I happen to think that Elf armies are the best I spent about a week or so working up the images for a paper army to suit my tastes.  The end result of these labours is available for free on the convoluted jumble of webpages that is my own little website.   Over the course of the week my ability to produce attractive images improved somewhat, which means that the Centaurs (Allied Fast Cavalry) which were drawn first are a wee bit plain when compared with the ‘Silk Road’ Elves I drew last.   There are Hobbits/Halflings too, including Wargoat Riders, - because I like Hobbits.  And because I only draw what I like, you’ll have to go elsewhere if you want other armies besides Elves, Centaurs and Hobbits. J

The URL for my webpage is: -

http://www.sharonofearth.homestead.com/SilkRoadElves.html 

Slowly repeat after me ......., ‘Wargaming does not need to be expensive.’      J  J  J