A few months ago I drew up some tattoo designs for a contest Dave Taylor was running. The idea was to design a Blood Pact (the chaos renegades from the Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts novel series) insignia, using the classic eight pointed chaos star, the symbol of the blood god Khorne and to wrap it all up with the design from the Ghosts own insignia.

Although Dave didn’t pick my design, I was recently contacted by a gentleman from the UK, who did love it and who wanted to use the design for his own tattoo. I agreed and here it is freshly inked.

I think it turned out great and I’m honored he chose to have my work permanently added to his body. So a big thank you to the newly inked gentleman. Enjoy your new art, it looks great.

This tale is the stuff of legends. It is hardly believable and I’m still having trouble wrapping my brain around it.

About two weeks ago, I was browsing the /tg/ pages on 4chan. Yeah yeah… 4chan. /tg/ is different. I love it there. There is a gaming community there like no other. So I’m browsing the threads and I see one offering to give a rather large Warhammer Fantasy Battles, Warriors of Chaos army to anyone who is willing to write a short paragraph about why they should receive it. Everyone thought it was a troll thread, and rightly so. If anything those boards are full of clever and dedicated trolls. But what the heck, you can’t win if you don’t play, so here’s what I wrote and sent to the poster in an email:

“I’ve never played Warhammer fantasy, though I’ve always wanted to. I just don’t have the cash flow to support a two system GW habit. I can’t bring myself to buy little plastic men over buying things for my two year old daughter. I love to paint and I’m not bad at it (if I say so myself). I’d do this army justice. I’ll put it online so you can see how your army has lived on in painted infamy. I’ll even post some battle reports. The guys I game with have really become excited about WFB new edition and they really want me to play with them. Why? I’m the fun one. I may not win every time but I always enjoy myself and the other guys enjoy it too. Yesterday, my man, Jenkins gets me to meet him at our FLGS and then he tries to buy me the skaven half of the Island of Blood set (they sell it piece meal there) just to get me into the game. I had to decline as I couldn’t accept the gift knowing I would feel bad having the models sit unassembled and unpainted for so long in my basement, I’d see them all the time and it would keep me up at night. I don’t need to lose sleep over skaven. I want to play WFB with my bros. I love chaos and have for a long long time. I own both realms of chaos books for way back. So when I saw this thread my first reaction was, “huh? whatever…” But then I thought of Jenkins yesterday, offering to buy me 50$ worth of skaven just so I’d play against him. So I thought, what the hell. I’ll check it out. If you don’t pick me, nothing will have been lost. But if you do you’ll be making a whole group of gamers happy, your army will live on bringing the burning hatred of the dark gods to all foes foolish enough to stand against them, and you’ll know they are not just being played, but being thoroughly enjoyed.”

Long story short, here is what I received in the mail from California, about 8 days later.

Dude even paid for the shipping. This is a big ass box.

Individually wrapped with love. I think I got a whole roll of paper towels too.

Everything. It took me 45 minutes to unpack it all.

Juggernaut of Khorne with a nice paint job.

Awesome Chaos Sorcerer with custom flames.

Gigantic Dragon Ogre.

Custom objective marker, very nice.

Hard to see Hellcannon and Chaos Dwarf crew. I love this model so much.

I’m still beside myself. The whole event is very surreal, this kind of thing never happens to me. But it did, and I’m grateful. Thanks Anon, whoever you are. You’ve done yourself and /tg/ proud. Your generosity is epic. Thank you for the awesome army.

I’ll be painting these guys up (over the next 10 years probably) and posting the progress here and on /tg/.

Now I have to get a army book and see how all this stuff goes together.

This heat wave is really softening up my brain. A few weeks ago Rob from Spikey Bits blog and formerly of Battle Wagon Bits and the Warstore, opened up a new gaming shop in town. It’s the first new store to open up here for a long while and we are happy to have it.

I haven’t made it out there yet. Like it says in the title, I’m a little slow on the draw this time of year, when my work environment becomes like unto the surface of the sun. It seems everyone else in town has and the peoples on the street say it’s great and from the pics Rob posted, I agree. I’ll try to get down there this weekend. They have a Mordheim league starting up and I’ve got a new possessed warband to blood.

Check out the FTW Games site.

The back story for our apocalypse game last week at Battle Hymn goes something like this:

Vaustgrad, a long suffering imperial city taken and held by the forces of chaos for over 50 years is under siege by the Imperial Guard and a surprising army of Eldar allies. As the Imperials and Eldar advance, the warp haunted streets of Vaustgrad pour forth the Malignant Host, a great combined army of chaos marines and chaos daemons, to meet them.

Mayhem ensues.

Here is another set of pics from the game.

http://picasaweb.google.com/doomshoes/BattleHymn#

Thanks to Commander Krieg for the fine photography.

-Skeller