Cut it open and see if it swallowed any gems.
July 11th, 2007 by Brack Posted in Cut It Open And See If It Swallowed Any Gems, Role-playing Games | Tags: Games Workshop, warhammer fantasy battle, whfb |
And so begins my new, long, meandering project. Talking about tabletop games. Most will be RPGs, but there will be a few wargames and boardgames on the way. Like this wargame - the one that started this whole hobby for me:
When I was 12 and in the second year of secondary school, Friday afternoon was set aside for “hobbies”. I picked “Wargames” having been enamoured by the small metal dwarves I had seen on sale in the local toy shop “Little People”. This shop was part of a shop called “JT White’s”, it mostly sold porcelain figures downstairs, but upstairs had toys and models. And also hairdressers. In my olfactory memory I will associate Citadel Miniatures and TSR games with the smell of perming chemicals.
Anyway myself and a few friends started playing this game after I purchased a second hand copy of the second edition from some older boys. It would have been 1987, so the 3rd edition had just come out making this redundant somewhat. I can’t recall us ever having that many miniatures for this game. I had a couple of dwarf single figures (back when they cost 60p each and had lead in them), a box set of metal “Dwarf Lords” and the box of plastic skeletons. I really can’t remember what my friends had. In fact that whole year seems a vague blur. I remember getting my first issue of White Dwarf (issue 100) in April 1988, and a year later I lending it to a kid called Lenny Oliver and I never got it back.
I remember my parents (read:mum) being a little wary about this whole endeavour as there was the fantasy RPGs = satanism thing going on at the time. Somehow I think it being a wargame and being British-made reassured them I wasn’t going to be a satanist. Of course within a year I had become more enamoured with RPGs than wargames. Albeit one that definitely wasn’t being turned into a scapegoat.
It turned out that was the last year the school had “hobbies”, but by the summer of 1988, my friends and I were meeting every Sunday afternoon for spikey chaos thrills and I was the proud owner of a subscription to White Dwarf, which came with a free game that changed my life.
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