Late in the summer of 1999 I purchased a box of 10 standard Space Marines, as they were the only race that interested me. I assembled and painted all 10 Space Marines and enjoyed the end result. After that, I was hooked. I had to have more. I purchased more troops. The more I built and painted, the more I enjoyed the vision of having an entire chapter painted. An unrealistic thought, so I scaled down my vision to that of a Battle Force of roughly 150 troops and supporting vehicles and equipment.
In early 2000, I began the process of building a website for my Space Marines, who by then I had labelled "The Spartans". I wrote an origin and history based on the ancient nation of Sparta. I found many similarities between the the Sparta culture and that of the Imperium and the military might of Space Marines from the Warhammer 40K game. I conducted lots of research and began to formulate the beginings of a website for the Spartans. The website has never been available on the internet, but it was a great source of information for me personally to collect notes about Space Marines, the Spartans and all the photos I took.
My interest in Space Marines was not my only obsession. There, buried deep within my soul, was a dark portal to the gods of Chaos. Games Workshop offered two wonderful armies in their fantasy version of Warhammer. The first of these armies was the Bretonians. Think King Arthur. An army of mounted knights. With the movie "Excalibur" ranking as one of my favorites, the Bretonians were a must-have army for me. The second army that called to me in a very inappropriate way was the forces of Chaos. The range of models was staggering. I had visions of a vast horde bent on destruction and domination of everything.
I had nearly as much fun building a back story for my armies as I did building the models. I tried playing the games with the models, but was quickly bored by the never-ending torrent of rules and dice. I never got into it. Admittedly, it always looked fun, but the actual game play when I was personally involved was, at best, boring, and at worse, obnoxious. I found that my love for the games was restricted to the crafting of the models. I enjoyed building, converting, painting and writing stories about them.
A few years ago moved to a new house. All my models were securely packed away. It wasn't until just this year that I finally began to expose all the great models I worked on. I found my tools, paints and boxes of models ready to be built and painted. Finding my models prompted me to see what others were doing on YouTube. There I found many people with incredible skills in building, converting and painting models. I was amazed and energized again to pursue model building.
In future posts I will talk about past models I have done and what models I'd like to build in the future.
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