Why Greenskins?

This whole Warhammer thing gathered steam pretty quickly: we've been playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for years (starting with 2nd Ed, evolving to +Andrew Law's homebrew rules), but not tabletop gaming. When Baz came back to GW Edinburgh, he got in touch with Andy, +Ross Lorimer, Harry Wright and I to come in and work on something. Years back, GW had all their retail stores collaborate on a display of the entire Ultramarines Chapter, all 1,000 of 'em. This year they're doing it again, and Baz has got a Terminator squard - the elite veterans of a Space Marine army. He thought it would be nice for us to contribute, so we did.

Terminators: mine, Ross's & Andy's

We were pretty pleased with them.

That was only 2 weeks ago, and here we are collecting an army: I thought long and hard about which force to collect: initially I was tempted by Skaven. They are sneaky and fun characters, and most of their models are cool (see exhibits A + B below).












Skaven Warlock Engineers. Awesome.

But, while they are cool models individually, collectively, there's a lot of brown there, which can make the army a little samey from a distance. Also, while the whole army is quite fast, they don't have cavalry. and I like me some cavalry. So that ruled out the vile ratmen.

Next I considered Chaos: some lovely models, such as the new Warriors unit, but given I only had interest in Marauders and Warriors, and not in trolls, daemons, giants, etc, the army would feel quite limited.

I briefly toyed with Bretonnians - I've wanted an army of them since I was a kid, reading White Dwarf when I was off sick from school. But they're fiddly to paint, so they can wait.

Which led me to Orcs.

I've only had three Warhammer Armies that I've collected fully. I've started and abandoned loads, but only three ever stuck: Empire, Lizardmen and Orcs and Goblins.

The Empire are great fun: I loved playing with them, and given our roleplay characters are from the Empire, there's lots of fluff reasons to choose them. But they were the last army I played, and what's more, Andy's doing Empire, so that's them out.

Lizardmen were a strange one. I played well with them, they were easy to paint, but I had no real love for them, fluff-wise. I found them a bit cold (appropriately enough, I suppose!).

Which led me to Orcs. Back in the day, I had a big old Savage Orc and Forest Goblin army. I never did very well with them, but I always had fun. I spent some time looking over the models, and the new plastics are great. The range is wide and diverse - lots of cavalry too! - and I like almost all the models in the army (only the Goblin Wolf Riders are let down by the old plastic wolves, but if I decide I need wolf-riders, some conversions may be in order...).

So...all that's a very long-winded way of saying...I like Orcs. ;)

I opted for a unit of Savage Orc Boys to start off with.

They're assembled now, and I aim to start painting either later this week or next week. Next post I'll pop up some pictures of the assembled Orcs and discuss their equipment...