So how did this all begin? What brought me to the point where my home is decorated with garishly painted miniatures in a variety of violent poses -- and drawn from numerous fantasy and science fiction settings -- and spend most of my time "watching" TV actually hunched over my painting station (one corner of my coffee table, covered in newsprint) with a seemingly endless supply of pewter and plastic figures?
It started in Green Bay. Well, actually, no that's not quite true. I was actually living in Sturgeon Bay (up in Door County, about 45 minutes from Green Bay) when I took the miniature plunge. Now I'd long had a vague interest in "that" side of the gaming and comic book stores, even while I spent most of my time turning colorful pieces of cardboard 90 degrees (er, playing Magic: The Gathering). The figures intrigued me -- I mean, they looked cool and the guys (and the occasional gal) playing them looked like they were having a lot of fun. But I looked at the prices on them and saw how many it took to play, and figured it was out of my price range, especially if I wanted to feed my Magic habit at the same time.
Moving to Door County both 1) took me out of the Magic gaming circles, which took some of the interest away in collecting the cards and 2) meant I was actually making a living wage that left me with a bit of discretionary income.
And there was a new gateway drug in 1999. While most Games Workshop (the English-based market leader in fantasy/science fiction tabletop gaming) systems required quite an investment, they had come out with a skirmish-based fantasy game called Mordheim that you could play with the contents of a starter box (which cost $60). I watched a few games, got a feel for what it was about and decided to take the plunge. With a bit of help from the more experienced gamers I was ready to start.
Well, not to start gaming. First, I needed to learn the arcane art of model assembly. Inside the Mordheim box was a rule book, a small bag of dice, short, red plastic rulers called "whup ass" sticks by the gang and several hunks of molded plastic. These were "sprues." Each one contained a variety of heads, torsos limbs, weapons and other equipment. With the help of a handy X-acto Knife, I began to extract the pieces and then use a pot of superglue to bond them together. Truthfully, I spent more time slicing into my fingertips and gluing my fingertips together than actually getting the models assembled (nowadays, I use hand snips on the plastic sprues; I still glue my fingertips together). I worked on the minis for a bit that evening at Rogue Traders in Green Bay, and then headed home to complete the job. It took some time but I got it done.
I hadn't bought any paint or brushes, so I couldn't start that side of the work. Impatiently, I went out to Wal Mart and picked up some spray paint to prime the models. That would have been OK, except I bought a glossy instead of a matte, giving the models a rather bright shine -- one that eventually made it rather tough to paint. The box provided two "sides," either a group of human mercenaries or sentient giant rat-men called Skaven. Since I'd used the glossy on the Skaven, I worked on the human side instead. Understand, I hadn't held a paint brush since high school, but here I was trying to pick out tiny tiny details on miniatures that were about an inch tall. Needless to say, those early experiences didn't turn out the best, but I found that the work satisfied a need deep inside. The mixture of collecting, gaming and creating was nearly perfect for me.
It didn't take long for me to go from that gateway into the hard stuff. A month or so later, I picked up a copy of Games Workshop's science-fiction game, Warhammer 40,000 (typically called 40k). There, I was introduced to a dark far future where my only hope sat with my sloppily painted forces. Again, the background sucked me in, but it was the gameplay -- with a mixture of strategy, brute force (from the minis, not the players) and furious dice rolling -- that kept me going.
In the last eight years, I've been through tons of game systems and a dizzying amount of models. Often, I get rid of rule books as I drift away from a particular game, but the Mordheim rulebook still sits in a place of pride on my bookshelf. (The glossy Skaven, however, were long ago sacrificed to one crazy conversion project or another.)
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