Call of the Hunt: A Tale of 4 Armies

This journey back into the nostalgia of my Warhammer armies has brought home to me how much I've changed as a collector, gamer and painter.

And no unit has done this more than the final unit for my Wood Elf army: the The Wild Riders.

Yes.

You're right, they're not Wild Riders, they are actually kitbashed from the Glade Rider box. This was a time when money tighter, Glade Riders were rubbish and the metal models were unappealing.

I don't think converting Wild Riders from the Glade Rider kit was an original idea I had, I'm sure I saw it on a forum somewhere, but as the plastic box contained swords, spears and other assorted weaponry, all that was required to 'convert' the Glade Riders into Wild Rain sets was making a few appropriate choices when assembling the models and filling in the holes in their backs where the cloaks (with moulded on quivers) were attached.

The less-than-skillful filling with blu-tac (yes, you read that right) was inexpertly covered with either spears or some of the millions of small blades that came on the different sprues strapped across them.

All in all, they are a passable job that is clearly different from the Glade Riders (especially with the different colour palette) and has never caused any confusion on the table. The only slight problem is that in Warhammer: The Old World someone has had the bright idea to give them shields rather than have them getting extra attacks on the second round of combat, so at some point I'm going to have to find a way to add those.

I'm terms of painting, I did very much the same thing as I did with my Wardancers: softening the orange of the robes, evening out the leather, giving the wood some variation and adding vibrancy to the skin, hair and stitching.

The horses were done the same way as the Glade Riders: darkening the hair and adding a coat of Apothecary White contrast paint over the somewhat scratchy drybrushing I'd done to smooth it out.

As I was doing this it became apparent just how sloppy I was when building these models. Lots of plastic tags needed trimming properly and the mould-line police would have a field day. I was also scruffy with my painting and had left plenty of details unattended.

I think this is because I wasn't yet using magnifying glasses when painting and hadn't quite worked out how bad my eyesight had become. It was blogging and the associated photographs that brought this to my attention and these were done pre-blog.

It's scary to think that I just didn't see the issues; or maybe I was just more chilled about such things then. At tabletop range they looked fine.

Barring a couple more Wild Riders (to turn the one unit of 8 into two units of 5), a kitbashed Spellsinger and my Grenadier dragon, that's they whole army ready for action. I've also got a couple of Great Eagles that were switched over to Lord of the Rings that can come back over to square bases, but I'm going to take a break from The Old World for a bit and leave this army where it is.

Importantly, what I now have is an army that I can use against people outside my regular gaming group as it has the official base sizes.

I'm toying with the idea of trying out a tournament for the first time in many years, although I must admit to being a bit nervous.

I'm the very definition of a casual gamer these days, skipping backwards and forwards between systems and the events I'm more used to are 7TV events where the rules are treated like guidelines at best -and that's by the designers.

Warhammer events are a different kettle of fish. People actually take them seriously and there's league tables, standings and the sort of stuff that makes people act weird.

I might dip my toe in by trying to arrange a game with someone at a FLGS over the Easter holiday and see how I feel going forward.

I'm really pleased with what I've done with my armies, it's been a proper nostalgia hit. However, observant readers will have noticed that in this Tale of 4 Armies, I've only worked on three of them.

The Skaven currently remains untouched for a few reasons. Firstly, I've been busy with the other three, but I also know that Skaven armies are big and will be a lot of work. I'm tempted to move in a different direction with them as I'm tempted to give Age of Sigmar a try with the new edition coming out in the summer. By chance the models I have are almost an exact replica of the units in the current Vanguard box so I know I have a viable force.

In their place I'm considering cobbling together a Chaos Army from the old models I reclaimed. Something in the vein of the weird and wonderful offerings in the original Realms of Chaos books.

Alternatively, of my old armies the only one missing is my Lizardmen army which got sold about a decade ago. I don't really miss them as they were from my 'drown it in ink' phase and so didn't look great. However, I do actually have some 5th edition Lizardmen and Skinks knocking about, so revisiting them could be an option.

Anyway, these are decisions for another day. I need to paint something else for a bit, bring back some variation to my life and actually start lowering that Lead Mountain again.

Acquired: 10
Painted: 216
Lead Mountain: 849