Classichammer

10 years ago, I started an adventure in Warhammer, and nothing would ever be the same again.


In contrast to my Tau army in Warhammer 40,000, whose beginnings are becoming ever more steeped in legend and myth as more and more of my childhood is lost like tears in the rain, the origin of my Wood Elves is much more clearly documented, because it is much more modern. This is because for most of the first 17 years of my existence my pop cultural genre tastes were very early and very, very, very strongly rooted in science fiction over fantasy. Like a lot of cis male lads born in the 1990s, I quickly developed a strong fascination with various kinds of technological machinery at an early age. What started as an obsession with real-life cars, trucks, agricultural and construction machinery and all kinds of aerospace vehicles quickly moved on to Thunderbirds, Beast Wars and this very obscure short-lived 1990s Flash Gordon cartoon once I discovered television (there were many, many, many more such cartoons to follow), and then Men In Black and Star Wars once I discovered VHS tapes, with various assorted space opera artwork running throughout as I discovered books. After discovering Lego I was always much more drawn to the Space and Aquanaut ranges than I ever was the Pirates and Castle ones. Later on when I discovered video games I largely overlooked Age Of Empires in favour of Command & Conquer and later Starcraft.


There were a few exceptions of course - Deltora Quest and later Harry Potter (because of course it did, I was born in the 1990s after all) remained very conspicuous islands of swords and dragons in a sea of lasers and spaceships, as did Slizers and later Bionicle. And every so often I would shamelessly pilfer some fantasy concept or another and work it into science fiction with Games Workshop efficiency - most of the fantasy universes I encountered in the wild invariably got elevated to 'future'-grade technology, and a lot of dragons got imported into space adventures, often receiving a cybernetic makeover in the process (seriously, why are there no cyber-dragons in 40k? Tolkien Orcs and Elves with spaceships are fine, but you draw the line at a general riding a giant fire-breathing cyborg dragon with a couple dozen laser cannons and missile launchers strapped onto it? REALLY?). But by and large, for pretty much all of my pre-adult life, the rule of thumb when it came to what kind of made-up worlds I liked was "Give me sci-fi or give me death".


It was in the aesthetics you see. Science fiction, especially the space opera variety that was my favourite, was full of all these spaceships and robots and hover tanks that all zipped around quickly (or stomped around ominously) and made cool noises, as well as all these lasers and rocket launchers and machine guns and such that all made the bad guys explode, which lent science fiction visuals a certain kind of explosive oomph that a bunch of dudes poking each other with sticks (or occasionally dropping rocks on each other) could just never quite match. This mixed with the distinctive brand of savage venomous tribalism that came naturally to me back then (I blame what appears to be a long line of hyper-competitive Tools on my father's side and the cycle of hyper-competition that they fostered) to produce a particularly cringeworthy fanaticism of science fiction over fantasy that persisted for over a decade and a half. Even when I started discovering Horror Films I locked onto psychological thrillers first because "oh my god only little babies are scared of ghosts and vampires and junk" (yes that really is what my poor wretched misguided self thought once upon a time).


(The other, even more horrifying side of this is that I also had a very unfortunate undercurrent of Toxic Masculinity imprinted on me from a young age, which left me feeling compelled to distance myself from a lot of fantasy content out of fear of it being too girly with all those princesses running around. However hard you might be cringing at reading that, I can assure you that I am cringing at least twice as hard thinking back on it. Fortunately increasing contact with girls in High School - and some key female role-models in the media I consumed - was eventually able to deprogram me of such lunacy)


Throughout this period there was also something else bubbling under the surface after I discovered tabletop games. After getting my first ever White Dwarf magazine copy in early 2006 I was introduced to the Dwarfs that inhabited this strange alien undiscovered country of Warhammer that existed on the far side of the Games Workshop hobby that was by now giving me Warhammer 40,000. This was important, because these Dwarfs weren't like other fantasy civilisations. They had guns. They had flamethrowers. They had a primitive clock-punk attack helicopter. And THAT was enough to get my attention, in much the same way that featuring a clock-punk space shuttle in The Last Hero was enough to get me interested in Discworld. It wasn't nearly enough to win me over to this whole fantasy thing, but it was enough to begin bridging the gap.


This was followed a little later by another White Dwarf magazine that introduced me to the Empire that inhabited this strange alien Warhammer game. Again, they had guns. And gattling guns. And rocket launchers. And a clock-punk tank. In the White Dwarf they were fighting these Vampire Count guys that had an army of zombies and wolves and ghosts and bats and things and while in the past these kinds of Halloween monsters had always felt kinda lame, these ones actually looked pretty dope.


Maybe this whole Warhammer fantasy thing isn't as lame as I first thought it was.


This more or less continued for a few years, before being completely swallowed up in the unprecedented upheaval that began in the 2010s. History is always a tangled chaotic mess of interlinking factors and causes and effects, and it is no different with the history of a person. But nonetheless, most historians traditionally trace the dramatic seismic shift in pop-cultural tastes that comprised the Fantasy Reformation of 2010 - 2012 to three key events.


The first was the discovery of Urban Fantasy TV shows, specifically Angel, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and especially Supernatural. This was important because, as well as being really fun cool amazing pieces of television, they all featured a common theme of including nominally fantasy elements like monsters and magic in the nominally technological world of 20th century civilisation - Supernatural even had the characters fighting the demons and vampires and monsters with guns. It was just the right blend of modern and fantasy, coming in at just the right time of peak moody adolescence when I was ripe for gothic content, that these shows became the final missing link needed to bridge the gap and get me interested in fantasy... of a sort.


Perhaps even more importantly for this story, these shows also primed me for what was to come for later...


The next watershed moment came not long after, around the winter of 2010, when I went through what is quite possibly the only true religious experience I have ever had thus far, almost entirely by accident. By this time I had gotten into the LetsPlay videos of Youtuber Helloween45 - Helloween covered Horror video games, which seemed like the next logical step after discovering Horror films and TV shows. For one of his videos he was forced by technical problems to put together a slide-show of screenshots and ran that with some music over it. Helloween will never know just how much of a profound earthshaking event he was about to unleash when he decided to use the song he chose, on what I assume was entirely a whim. But he made that fateful choice, and I, following his videos, heard that song, and nothing would ever be the same again.


The song was called Amaranth, and it was by a band called Nightwish.


Words cannot convey just how profound listening to that song was. See, up until this point I had never really quite gotten music. Like, I could enjoy listening to it well enough, and I could follow Top 40 Pop music enough to converse with the girls at high school about it, but the idea of being as invested in it as much as I saw a lot of people was alien to me. I just wasn't really passionate about music like I was other things, and I could not give a favourite genre, artist or song to save my life (in fact, I actually failed a couple of class projects because of it). But this was different. Listening to this song, for the first time I really felt myself reflected in music. When I discovered Nightwish, I found my voice.


When I discovered Nightwish, I finally found my sound.


For the rest of the year, my eardrums quickly began to swim in a soup of symphonic metal as I devoured every Nightwish song I could find on Youtube as ravenously as I had devoured Warhammer 40,000 lore eight years earlier. That Christmas my best friend got me a CD of Dark Passion Play that remains one of my most treasured possessions, and I listened to it religiously for the next year. I would of course later discover other artists of a similar style that I loved, but Nightwish would forever remain my all-time favourite, and Amaranth my all-time favourite song.


But Amaranth did more than just that. It also opened my eyes to looking at traditional fantasy in a whole new light. It's soundscape, atmosphere and accompanying music video that I watched 1100 times finally got me thinking that epic fantasy adventures could be, well, epic in their own right. And then I discovered this other little number.


It was called The Last Of The Wilds.


There are no words in The Last Of The Wilds, just 6 minutes of heart-melting instrumental beauty, and the more I listened to it the more inspired I was of faraway lands of snow-veiled mountains, deep forests of rich green pines, storm-scourged seas at midnight, silver full moons and stars, giant hawks and eagles, fearsome dragons and adventure at every turn. Now, I was finally vibing with traditional fantasy, without any technological training wheels. By now I had also been thoroughly opened up to the subgenre of dark fairy-tales and had also gotten into Once Upon A Time.


This too primed me for what was soon to come...


By this stage my curiosity of Warhammer had crystallised into genuine deep interest and a resolution to get involved with it at some point. My starting up with Warhammer was no longer a question of 'if', but of 'when' and 'with what game faction'. The front-runners at this point were Dwarfs (still riding the initial "Oh wow they have guns" factor and piggy-backing on my explosively growing obsession with all things Nordic at the time), Bretonnians (having rediscovered them after rethinking everything I had ever believed about fairytales and, as mentioned, Once Upon A Time) and Vampire Counts (plugging into all that Horror shtick that I had deep-dived into in the preceding years and Victoria Frances artwork. Plus I still thought the concept of an army of horror monsters was pretty dope). The Empire and High Elves were also intriguing possibilities. There were also these Beastmen and Wood Elf armies that I remained curious about, having inquired into them in the past (before the Fantasy Reformation) but was unsure of what to make of them, save that the Wood Elves had these cavalry troops that rode GIANT HAWKS which was the dopest thing ever (so much so that I had stolen the concept and given it a sci-fi twist many years earlier).


Then came the third watershed moment of the Fantasy Reformation of 2010 - 2012. And my fate was sealed.


In the spring of 2012, around Term 3 of my final year at high school, I began to become aware of the latest video game Blizzard was working on. I think someone might have shared the trailer with me at some point. Regardless of how I found it, this trailer showed me a window into a dark gloomy fantasy world where humans struggled to survive in the crossfire of wars between angels and demons. In other words, the culmination of all of the things that I had been deep-diving into over the last couple of years. I knew then that I had to have this video game and play through it. I needed to know more.


The trailer was for a video game called Diablo III.


The really important thing happened a short while later, when more information about the game became available and it turned out that one of the playable character options in this upcoming game was a person called a Demon Hunter. Demon Hunters roamed the land of the game's setting fighting Demons with crossbows and various ingenious traps and devices - just like the characters in Buffy, Angel and Supernatural. Demon Hunters went about their adventures clad head to toe in brooding dark cloak-and-hood getup, just like a lot of the characters in the fantasy artwork that I thought looked the most rad. And the female character model looked a lot like a lot of the singers in all the symphonic metal bands that had by now well and truly become my jam. In other words, this character class embodied the culmination of all the things I had been deep-diving into over the last couple of years. It was meant to be. I knew that when I got my hands on this Diablo III video game, that would be the character I would play as.


I got my hands on that Diablo III video game for Christmas that year, and then spent the rest of the summer enjoying the simpler pleasures of shooting demons in the face with a crossbow. It was tremendous, enormous fun and I loved every second of it (except when the game said no because my wifi wasn't good enough for it). And from then on I knew exactly what I wanted my first Warhammer army to be like - I wanted an army just like the Demon Hunter I had been playing as. I would accept no substitute. In the moments when I could manage to tear myself away from Diablo III, I scoured the Warhammer model ranges for a game faction that would give me the army style I so craved, and began to grow increasingly dismayed when I found nothing that came even close to it...


... until I remembered that Wood Elf line and gave it another look over.


Yes. This was it. The Waywatcher models were enough to cue me into this line being the one that would provide me with the army of cloaked hooded bow-slinging anti-heroes that I so desired. Sure, they used plain old longbows instead of the cool snappy pistol crossbows I had been enjoying in Diablo III, but that was a minor annoyance at most. It was still close enough.


And so it was that in early 2013, I went out after my University classes had finished for the day, visited the GW store that was conveniently just a 15-minute walk away from campus at the time, and went home with a copy of the rulebook for 8th edition Warhammer. A few weeks later, I did the same thing and went home with a copy of the Wood Elf army book and a Battalion Box on which to found my brand-new army for this strange new world of fantasy adventure.


It is from that box that came these two:
















The Wood Elf Battalion box contained a surplus of Glade Guard sprues, more than was needed for the units of 16 I had already decided I wanted. I quickly worked out that I would have enough pieces for a full unit of 16 Glade Guard, a small band of 5 Scouts, and then three Glade Guard figures left over. These could easily be made into Characters for a Wood Elf army, and indeed that's what I did with one of them - we'll get to her later. The final two I decided to build as regular archers and put to good use as test models to practice painting on. This was very important, because the Wood Elf model range is one of the most beautiful model lines ever made for Warhammer, which in turn meant that I was absolutely terrified of painting them, because up until then my painting had largely consisted of throwing colour at models until it was impossible to see the undercoat through it. I had almost zero confidence that I would end up doing the sculpts the justice they deserved.


The only thing that kept me going and persuaded me to try was the colour hobby section in the Wood Elf book. It featured these zoomed-in insets of certain parts of the models, which was important because not only did it show me for the first time that the 'Evy Metal studio painters were not, in fact, flawless in their painting, but also through studying them intensely I finally came to understand how highlighting works in paint.


When I finished these two prototypes in April 2013, they represented the very apex of my model painting at the time and showcased the very bleeding edge in my range of painting skills. They combined my newfound comprehension of highlighting with the precision detailing I had honed on Battlefleet Gothic models in the preceding years. I followed the instructions in the painting guide of the Wood Elf book to the letter, because I loved the GW studio scheme for the Wood Elves and wanted mine to look like that. Granted the greens they were painted in were a far cry from the dark drab browns and greys of the Diablo III Demon Hunters that had brought me to them, but it was a happy change since green is my favourite colour.


They have not exactly aged gracefully, something not helped by their use as a testbed for paint sealing and finishes. The primitive method employed here - a coat of gloss varnish followed by a coat of Lahmian Medium to remove the shine - was never entirely satisfactory and always seemed to leave an unacceptable amount of shine on them even at the best of times, and one of these days I will go back and repair the finish as best as I can with the methods and resources I now have at my disposal. But nonetheless, I was awfully proud of them at the time, and they motivated me to keep going with the rest of the army, which only looked better.


And that then, was the beginning of the Meadows of Heaven.

It is fair to say that these days my enthusiasm for Warhammer is at a low point. While I do still nominally enjoy it, my excitement for Warhammer is on its last legs, having been suffocated by the return of the hegemony of joyless bean counters that did far more damage to the game than GW ever could have. Even the prospects of a few eager 6th-curious folk near me has done little to rekindle my joy or stave off the intrusive thoughts of fire and plastic.

It's so bad that the 10-year anniversary of my getting into Warhammer came and went without so much as a quick acknowledgement, so drained of excitement have I become. And the press releases surrounding the fan fiction accompanying GW's TOW system have only awoken an ice-hot rage not felt in many long years.


But it was not always so. Ten years ago Warhammer promised to be the dawn of an exciting new age, a revolution in my tabletop hobby.


It was, most fittingly, one late summer's afternoon when I went home from university with a Wood Elf Battalion box, and it took all my strength to wait until I got home before tearing off the shrink wrap and poring over the sprues inside. And what a marvel to behold they were! Knife variants! Cloak variants! Special jeweled cloaks for the champions! Banner variants! And best of all, a huge array of beautiful fun little doodads to stick on bases. My first taste of Warhammer models was so amazing it put me right at ease and I completely forgot my crushing intimidation at painting not only beautiful Wood Elf model sculpts, but also banners and tiny elven runes for the first time.

I immediately set to work preparing the infantry figures that were at the top of the box - conveniently its contents were layered top to bottom in exactly the order I wanted to tackle them in. The box contained a surplus of archer sprues - enough to make eight more than the band of 16 Glade Guard I had planned. Two of the extras were used as the test models I've shown earlier. One was reserved for a particularly special purpose - we'll get to her later.


But the remaining five became my first ever Warhammer unit, the Wood Wasps.









This army actually marked the official start of my tradition of always starting with a unit of foot troops where appropriate - because unless it's a game of giant starships or robots infantry are usually going to be the most important cornerstone of the fighting force in question. Unlike later armies however, the starting infantry unit was a band of elite reconnaissance troops, because their composition as loose formation skirmishers made them closer to the Warhammer 40,000 infantry teams I was more familiar with and that made them a more natural stepping stone into Warhammer as I worked up towards ranked units.

Besides, from the outset I knew I wanted a force of Scouts in the army, because I also always want the best reconnaissance and scouting capabilities I can get. Victory often goes to the side with the best eyes and ears, and being able to identify and track opposing formations and get good intimate knowledge of the local area is always a powerful advantage. In my Tau army that had always been accomplished by a team of Pathfinders, so for Warhammer it was only natural to go for a unit of the best scouting troops available to the best game faction at scouting and reconnaissance - the Wood Elf Scouts.

It did not take a tactical genius to identify them as the direct Warhammer equivalent to Pathfinders, only making use of great stealth over great speed. Since gas turbine engines, satellite navigation, laser target designators and long-range surveillance space radars weren't things in this setting, successful information gathering would come down to cunning, wit, keen eyes and ears, a good elven cloak for camouflage and the stealth to closely observe the opposing army without them ever knowing it.

The painting was fairly straightforward, following the step by step instructions for painting Glade Guard outlined in the Wood Elf army book. The process went surprisingly smoothly and I was very pleased with the results. Like the Glade Guard they use the hooded head variants, but the pattern is flipped - where the Glade Guard rank and file have masked hooded heads and the command group have unmasked, here it's the reverse, with the rank and file sporting no face masks to maximise their field of vision while only the champion retains a mask.

This is also just about the only Warhammer unit I ever made with anything less than the full command options available to it. This was mostly because at the time some vague wording in the army book meant I was not entirely sure if Scouts could in fact take command options of any kind, only learning later that they could (and even then it was years before working out that it made them the ideal delivery vehicle for a Banner of The Zenith). But having just a Champion is enough for a tiny 5-elf scouting party so I'm not too bothered even now.


It also marked the first real beginnings of the backstory behind the army.

THE WOOD WASPS





The presence of the Wood Wasps is rarely seen in the Meadows Of Heaven, for they spend much of their time outside the domains of that realm. As the principle Scout kindred of the Meadows of Heaven it is the Wood Wasps who man the Outer Sentinels that guard the approaches to Athel Loren, as well as the Inner Sentinels that guard the approaches to the Meadows Of Heaven within the great forest itself. They also frequently range out into the lands beyond Athel Loren to watch, learn and gather news, reporting back to the Wishmaster when they return to keep him and his court up to date with the goings on of the wider world.

The Wood Wasps were the only Scout kindred in the Meadows Of Heaven to survive Cyanathair's first invasion of the Meadows of Heaven, and remain the secret fifth major warrior kindred to form the bulk of the Meadows of Heaven's fighting force. They are comprised of the Asrai living there possessed of the greatest curiosity and wanderlust among their kind, putting their passions to good use in their role of ranging far and wide and scouting out the enemies of the Wood Elves.

Each army sent from the Meadows of Heaven is always accompanied by a party of Wood Wasps to range ahead and act as the commanding elf's eyes and ears. Wood Wasps act in small bands of just five Asrai, which keeps their presence as inconspicuous as possible, and the lack of numbers is no hinderance for their main purpose is observation and surveillance rather than direct battle, though they will not hesitate to inflict what havoc they can on the enemy should the opportunity present itself.

Wood Wasps fight with the Scout Bow as their principle weapon. While this design of longbow lacks the punch and stopping power of the heavier Glade Guard Longbow, it is considerably lighter and more compact, making it less encumbering when moving through dense terrain for extended periods, and it is still precise enough to strike wild game or errant goblins with equal ease.

For close in fighting Wood Wasps carry the elven daggers common to all warriors of the Meadows of Heaven. Also like most warriors of the Meadows of Heaven Wood Wasps wear Lauralinae cloaks, enchanted to provide concealment amongst undergrowth, keep water out, bring warmth in winter and never wear or tear. Wood Wasps also travel with an array of messenger birds for relaying information back to their friends, including falcons for dangerous trips and owls for night-time communication, crucially important for coordinating the nighttime manoeuvres that commonly employed by the armies of the Meadows of Heaven.

But the most important wargear of all for a Wood Wasp is their keen elven senses and their sharp wits. Wood Wasps spend much time studying the world, especially the plants and creatures not only within Athel Loren and the realms surrounding the great forest, but also many many other corners of the world. They keenly study matters of geography, history and culture among as many regions as possible, and this wealth of knowledge, carefully cultivated over many mortal lifetimes, allows them to understand the world such that they might better guide the Asrai of the Meadows Of Heaven with superb precision and insight.

And that was my first concrete step into Warhammer. Perhaps one day I will touch up the wear and tear on these pioneers, but until then I still remain pretty happy with them.

And they were in time joined by others....

Top notch work, Kakapo! Can't wait to see the rest of the force, and can't wait to see how embarrassing mine will look by comparison...

Just Tony wrote: ↑Fri Jan 05, 2024 12:57 pm Top notch work, Kakapo! Can't wait to see the rest of the force, and can't wait to see how embarrassing mine will look by comparison...

Thanks! If you really want to feel better about paint jobs you can always head over to my Tau thread to see some examples of what my painting looked like before these guys.

But if you're eager to see the rest of the force then you're in luck here because my recent Warhammer outings have got me thinking back to how this army came about again.

After finishing the Scouts, my first ever unit for Warhammer, work started almost immediately on the rest of the archers (save one of course) from the Battalion box set, the 16 chosen to become a band of Glade Guard and my first ever ranked line regiment for Warhammer.

These would however prove far more challenging, and ended up becoming the longest and most difficult model project I had ever done to that point. Looking back the actual time period was still not very long, about 3 or 4 months or so, but at the time it seemed to last an eternity.


What made things so difficult was the ranking nature meant all the models had to line up flush together side by side in base contact. This is not too much of a challenge in and of itself, but Glade Guard are your classic hooded and cloaked rogue archer types, which means two things:

1) They have arms thrust directly forward in shooting poses, which project forward.

2) They have dramatic billowing cloaks, which project sideways.

These two features mean that each Glade Guard model occupies extra space, and makes it very complicated to line them all up next to each other without their cloaks pushing into the models next to them and their bow arms poking into the models directly in front of them.


I am not a total dumb-dumb, so I had anticipated and planned for this when I first started the project. My plan was to mock up the poses and positioning of the models by dry-fitting their components together with blue-tack, allowing me to test out how to set them up so they would all fit together nicely. It seemed like a sensible idea, but it had two fatal flaws. First, the blue-tack I had available was not particularly strong, causing the model pieces to fall apart far too quickly and left the models collapsing into each other in a sticky pile of model bits right when I had finished lining them up. The other flaw was that since blue-tack is soft and elastic, the pieces attached to it would bend if they had any pressure applied to them, causing the cloaks in particular to get squeezed into their attached models in ways they never would when glued.


This left me with no other option but to work on the unit model by model, painting up one or two at a time, assembling them, and then positioning them not to bump into each other, which was effective but took a very long time and gave very little sense of real progress. But even after all the models were painted and assembled, the problems still did not stop.


See, when I started the Wood Elf army my budget was not limitless, and certain things had to be sacrificed in the name of procuring the models and rules needed to start - specifically basing materials. For the first couple of months, I had none of the basing materials I had planned to get, and the 'completed' Wood Elf models were blue-tacked to their bases while they waited for them to arrive. This was part of the plan, because I had always planned to paint and assemble the models apart from their bases and then decorate the bases separately, gluing the models down only once their base was finished (this was of course done to avoid the problem of models' feet getting covered in a layer of sand and flock which I had encountered with my first attempts at basing many years earlier). But it also meant that when the basing supplies finally did arrive it required another month or so of going back and individually basing all the models one by one, which ended up almost doubling their time to completion.


By the end of it I was utterly burnt out on painting Warhammer models. But I also had my first ever ranked unit of troops.




Doubtless you will immediately note the hooded heads. As I mentioned in the last post all the archers in the army, both Scouts and Glade Guard, use the hooded heads that come on the Glade Guard sprue. This is because I had been playing hundreds of hours of Diablo III as a Demon Hunter and loved every second of it, and wanted to play Warhammer with an army of hooded rogues carrying missile weapons. Seeing the first ranked mass of hooded cloaked elf rogues put together was all the vindication I needed for my proof of concept.





While this was going on the identity of both this unit and the wider army was starting to take shape, nourished by a steady stream of Nightwish and shooting demons in the face with crossbows (I did also dabble a little in smashing demons in the face with an axe and devouring demons with an army of spiders, but they just didn't quite do it for me the same way as shooting them in the face with crossbows did). It was also influenced by research into the Wood Elf army book itself and my first glances into online tactics guides, because at this time I still had no real idea how Warhammer was supposed to work and had not yet learnt that online Warhammer tactics guides were all largely written by Joyless Bean Counters Who Hate Fun.





Having looked at the various unit options at my disposal and worked out what ones I wanted to use most of all, I had already settled on a core of no fewer than four Glade Guard regiments. This was a good mirror of the four Troops units that were a common fixture of the small 2000 point Warhammer 40,000 armies I was already familiar with, had a nice visual symmetry and seemed like a nice round number of basic troop units to hang other stuff off. What's really important at this stage however, is that it was very quickly apparent that this was also a perfect number to theme each Glade Guard unit around a different season - four Wood Elf archer kinbands, four seasons, it all lined up perfectly.


Having looked at the various tactica guides I had... been told that most of the stuff I liked most was a garbage waste of points and money and that I was a mentally impaired dumb baby who should hit himself in the head with a baseball bat for bothering with it at all and honestly was a clueless weak fake fan for not just investing in a bunch of manly meatbread guzzling Chaos Warriors and a Bolt Thrower album instead. Because apparently there were only three Warhammer factions that you were allowed to like, and the rest all just existed to have mean things written about them. And that pattern repeated down to the scale of army 'builds' within each faction too. That was what the Warhammer 'community' was like in 2013. Who am I kidding that's what it's still like in most parts of the internet today too.


But I digress. I had also learnt amongst the digital jock posturing that one very good combination for a Wood Elf army was a unit of Glade Guard joined by a Spellweaver with a Resplendence of Luminescents. This gave the wizard a unit to hide in, and the Luminescents made the archers' shooting attacks inflict Magical damage, and the range of a lot of the Spellweaver's magic spells were about the same distance as the range the Glade Guard wanted to be at when shooting stuff, so it was a nice symbiosis all around.



I already wanted a bunch of Glade Guard, and I also already knew I wanted a Spellweaver, and I did like the sound of the Resplendence of Luminescents because the name Luminescents sounds a lot like the name Evanescence and I was finally starting to become more open about loving that band after years of keeping that to my chest in high school. And it resulted in my Glade Guard shooting Enchanted Arrows dealing Arcane Damage! HELLS YES!

So it did not take much convincing to get me on board for that particular photocopy special.


But the most crucial part of all this is it brought me to the first role of one of these Glade Guard units - a regiment of bodyguards to watch over and protect my mages as they travelled the land getting into adventures.





Painting my first ever ranked Warhammer unit also meant painting my first ever command group.






This was a daunting prospect inside the already daunting prospect of doing justice to such beautiful model sculpts. The first challenge was in getting in one of the Spites that came on the sprue as a base doodad. Initial mockups quickly showed that the Spite would not fit with the Champion on the same base, so it ended up getting moved to the archer next to the Champion, placed so that it was still adjacent to the unit leader.








The Lord's Bowman herself was scary to work on but ultimately became a very successful experiment. She made use of all of the fancy Champion bitz, and while experimenting with placement to fit her billowing cloak in amongst the rest of the unit, I stumbled upon the idea of standing her atop two leaves to both give some extra presence and some extra clearance for the Spite that slips in under her bow arm.

The biggest challenge of all, however, was the standard bearer.







Up until this point my experience with adding markings was almost entirely based on transfer decals. I had made precisely one single attempt to freehand unit markings on some of my Tau, and the results were so crude and ungainly that I immediately swore off ever trying to add them again and stuck exclusively to decals moving forward. But to my horror I discovered that there was no GW decal sheet for Wood Elves, meaning that all of those delicate intricate elven runes and pseudo-Celtic border braids on the GW studio banners were in fact freehanded and my only chance at replicating them was to somehow freehand them myself.


The first attempts tested out the method that would become standard for freehanding all my Wood Elf banners - blocking out the basic outline shape in white (for maximum visibility against the dark green background), then filling over it with black, and then finally painting in the actual details with gold leaving a black border. There were numerous points where the whole thing was wiped and started over from scratch, but eventually I reached a point where the end result was at last acceptable.


The banner here would become a typical example of all my Glade Guard banners, and is divided into three main parts. The first part, the top flag, has most of the elven runes on it - for this one I carefully selected some elven runes from the Magic Item section of the army book based on which ones I planned to use on the Battle Standard Bearer so I could practice them here. This flag is also asymmetric, with only one side decorated because painting those tiny elven runes on one facing was difficult enough already.


The second section, the middle flag, is the most important for the unit because it is the middle flag that contains all of the unique iconography that identifies the unit. In this case there are a couple of extra elven runes, because I wanted the extra practice, some attempts at the infinity spirals that are the de facto faction logo for the Wood Elves, and the main icons themselves. Two are the same as would eventually go on the army Battle Standard (again done here as a practice run). Two mark the first pair of Nightwish shout-outs to be featured in the army. The rest are all fairy magic symbols; a flower, a butterfly, and a field of stars.


Finally, the bottom two flags were given what was supposed to be a lightning motif (lightning bolts being the classic magic effect after all), but never quite managed to live up to my original concept because I have never quite been able to draw or paint lightning properly.


This iconography then came back into contact with the growing concept for where my particular elves came from and the culture behind them, specifically the centre of magical knowhow in my woodland empire. This was beginning to shape into one of the more obscure Nightwish references in the army backstory.

By this point I had started to grow increasingly familiar with the online Nightwish Mythos and was fairly familiar with most of their album covers if not the songs contained within. And one of those album covers stuck out at me when it came to magic and fantasy. It was a simple piece, with none of the fancy paintings that were a staple of its sister albums. Instead it was a humble photograph, containing a lonely moon looking out across a lonely hill with a single lone tree on it, the whole thing lit up with a brilliant twilight sunset.

The album was Angels Fall First.


Shut up this could totally be in the middle of an enchanted wood I'm not listening to you I can't hear you


The deep dark twilight sunset, the nearly full moon, the lone ancient tree on a desolate rise, the whole thing screamed faerie magic to me, and I knew that my Wood Elf wizards had to come from there.

Thus was born the Celestial Heath, at the heart of the Fey Glades in the Meadows of Heaven, and the home of Summer Lightning.

SUMMER LIGHTNING



Deep within the Meadows of Heaven, just beyond the crystal pools of the Maiden Falls, lie the secret Fey Glades. They are mysterious otherworldly places, where nymphs dance with faerie sprites amongst gardens of flowers that shine with radiant colour amidst the gloom of the wood. At the very centre of the Fey Glades is a large clearing surrounding a single desolate hill, atop which stands an ancient lone tree. This is the Celestial Tree at the heart of the Celestial Heath, and from beneath its leaves one can read within the wheeling stars the ever-winding path of destiny with wondrous and terrible precision. At other times, when the green moon rises, its baleful light casts wonderous many-coloured auras across the sky above the Celestial Heath, and from their hues and pathways one can discern how the winds of magic are blowing across the world.

These attributes make the Celestial Tree a valuable site for any who wish to study the arcane way of magic, and so the area has drawn magi to it since the Meadows of Heaven were first settled by the elves. To this day the Fey Glades remain the focal point for arcane study and practice in the Meadows of Heaven, and most of the mages of that realm hail from there. The Asrai of the Fey Glades have a long tradition of supplying the rest of the Meadows of Heaven with skilled magic practitioners and by longstanding tradition the warrior kinbands of the Fey Glades and Celestial Heath are dedicated to their protection.

Summer Lightning has always been the largest of the warrior kinbands hailing from the Fey Glades, and was the only one to survive the terrible battles of Cyanathair's first invasion of Athel Loren. Since then the kinband has grown in size and incorporated numerous Asrai households into its fold, and today it can almost be considered a full kindred in its own right. All those elves dwelling within the Fey Glades who are bound to serve their part as Glade Guard are inducted into Summer Lightning, and collectively form a loose network of warrior kinbands united by a common home and common purpose. Each of these Summer Lightning kinbands is responsible for guarding the Spellsingers and Spellweavers from the same household they belong to, and the bonds of trust and kinship between each mage and their attendant guardians run very strong indeed.

Wood Elf mages are commonly tasked with acting as envoys to foreign lands, and the mages of the Meadows of Heaven are no exception. It falls to the Glade Guard of Summer Lightning to keep watch over them during these travels and ensure their safety while abroad, and because of this the warriors of Summer Lightning learn much of the world beyond Athel Loren. Though not as well-traveled as the Wood Wasps, most elves of Summer Lightning are nonetheless knowledgeable of at least a few corners of the world besides their own and often grow fluent in foreign languages and customs.

Where the warriors of Summer Lightning truly excel however is in knowledge of the arcane and especially in how to battle forces of magic and sorcery. They share much of the training and study of their mage kin (albeit applied to a more martial bent), and put it to use in understanding and fighting the magical enemies of the Meadows of Heaven, especially creatures born of unnatural powers such as malevolent sprits and daemons. Their studies extend to most magical creatures however, and most Summer Lightning Glade Guard have at least some understanding of how to face down nearly any given monster they might encounter in their adventures. This knowledge is put to especially deadly practice when their arrows are enchanted by the Luminescent Spites that are common to the Fey Glades and which readily befriend the elven mages from there.

The warriors of Summer Lightning make use of the same wargear as the other Glade Guard kinbands of the Meadows of Heaven, especially the legendary and much feared Glade Guard Longbow. Each Glade Guard warrior by tradition fashions their own longbow, so that it is perfectly matched to their own unique needs and fighting style. All such longbows share a common general design however, one which is heavier and bulkier than the cheaper Scout Bow but offers much greater stopping power at close range, able to match a dwarf crossbow in punch while being more precise and manoeuvrable, making it ideal for use in direct battle.

As well as their traditional longbows Summer Lightning warriors carry elven fighting knives and short swords common to all the Glade Guard of the Meadows of Heaven, and are trained to be as proficient in hand to hand combat as they are at archery. Also in common with much of the warriors of the Meadows of Heaven they wear hooded cloaks of Lauralinae, enchanted to keep out rain, keep in warmth, breathe away summer heat, blend with foliage and snow and to never snag or tear. The banners they fight under are also fashioned of Lauralinae, to make them easy to craft and repair and so that they can be draped across branches and camouflaged amongst the trees when the kinband is hiding or waiting in ambush. Finally in common with many of the other warriors of the Meadows of Heaven Summer Lightning Glade Guard wear comfortable yet sturdy wearing leather boots and gloves and frequently collect valuable items and treasure while travelling in their adventures.



In the years since then the Glade Guard of Summer Lightning have had a fairly solid career across numerous battles and generally making a good name for themselves. True to their backstory even when they fumble all their shooting attacks they usually make up for it by shredding whatever it was they were shooting at in melee, and recently have begun to rake up a fairly impressive count of slain monsters (no less than two Giants*, two Trolls and an Ogre or two). They also have an excellent track record of keeping their attendant Spellweaver alive - but she is a story for another day...



*one of these 'giants' was actually a pair of giant Mangler Squigs, but I no longer remember if they were being used as a Giant or actual Mangler Squigs and since I'm a 6th edition Oldhamerer I decided to err on listing them as a second Giant. Still an impressive feat either way.

Tall Poppies.


That's what they called us, almost 20 years ago. It was towards the end of my final year of primary school, which today remains one of the happiest times of my life, and I had been called in with a bunch of other classmates, a lot of whom I was friends with, and a lot of whom in hindsight were probably considered the highest performing academically, for a short little lecture thing. There we were sat all around in a quiet classroom, and my teacher at the time (an Atreides-grade tutor who happily indulged in my passions for fictional worlds, introduced us all to the wider body of Douglas Adams and who will forever hold my eternal admiration) explained to us that we were all of us a a special sort called Tall Poppies.

Being Tall Poppies meant that we were especially intellectually gifted types, with enormous potential in life, but it also meant we were likely prone to eccentricities and, most crucially, would draw a lot of ire from others, because the world was very hostile to eccentric intellectually gifted types with sensitive souls, and would likely throw all manner of venom at us as we grew older, because people fundamentally do not like Tall Poppies. They typically try to cut down the Tall Poppies in their midst.

Doubtless for the kids in the audience today this will all sound terribly elitist and bourgeoise, and it is true they missed a bit of a trick in not recognising that everyone can be a Tall Poppy with the right circumstances behind them, but remember this was back in the ancient halcyon days of 2005, when everything was all milkshakes and rich girls and lovely lady lumps, and when Hummers roamed the earth. It was still a very neoliberal bourgeoise time.

More importantly though, it was very uplifting for me at the time, I got a really good feeling out of considering myself a Tall Poppy, a bright shining example along with all my other fellow Tall Poppies. I wore it as a badge of pride.

Then primary school ended, and intermediate school began.

The horrors of those dark times, and of the high school and university years that followed, are not stories for this thread. Some secrets are best left left undiscovered, the galaxy remains a better place for them being undisturbed. Suffice to say that much of the world began to damn well try its hardest to cut this particular Tall Poppy down to size, or failing that to stomp it flat. And it's never really stopped.

This is compounded by my discovery that, as that teacher long ago was probably trying to warn us all about, I happen to inhabit a country with a very, very deep distaste for ambition and high achievement. The urge to cut down the Tall Poppies is strong, most visibly illustrated by one of the most grievous insults in its cultural lexicon being 'Tryhard'.

And in 2013, as I was drawing up plans for my Wood Elf army, it was this story, this overwhelming impression of the whole world trying to cut down this Tall Poppy, this tremendous desire to just see all the Tall Poppies grow free, that was the genesis for the Glade of Poppies, and the guardians who defended them.



After I had enjoyed a much needed palette cleansing break working on Tau starships, I returned to the fantasy project and followed up my first full regiment with my second Warhammer regiment and my first ever metal Warhammer troops, the Eternal Guard. The reason for this choice for the next addition to the army was simple - I was working towards a very specific goal that was critically important to the army overall, but in order to make absolutely certain I would do a good job of it I needed to build up to it in a series of three distinct stages. The first of these stages had been getting some practice in on the basics of painting Wood Elves with the archers. The next stage would be to practice painting gold/bronze Elven armour, and there was no better unit to practice that on than 20 Eternal Guard models.



Of course, quite besides such matters of practical convenience, I had also quickly grown to love the imagery and concept of the Eternal Guard as an elite anchor unit around which the nimble Glade Guard regiments pivoted and weaved. The awesome artwork of them battling skeletons in the snow that featured in the army book only sweetened the deal, as did the spectacular metal sculpts and the awe inspiring green and gold colour scheme the 'Evy Metal studio painted theirs in.

Plus I really like the name Eternal Guard. It's very fun to say with the Rs rrrolled. "The EtEARrnal GuaRred." "The ETERNAL GUARD."

I guess it's kind of hard to properly convey in text format, without being able to hear the full scenery chewing going on. But take my word for it.



Painting the unit went much more smoothly than the Glade Guard. The largely prebuilt metal sculpts meant getting them to rank up was very easy, which left me free from worrying about making sure they lined up next to each other and let me work through them in batches. This resulted in getting through about one rank of them each week in what remains one of the most successful examples of assembly line painting in the modern era of my model painting.

The colours were much the same as the rest of the Elves, with two notable exceptions being the lighter green cloth, painted with Warboss Green and highlighted with Nurgling Green, and of course the golden bronze armour which was done with a base of Hashut Copper drybrushed with Ghenna's Gold and a final drybrush of Golden Griffon to give a silvery finish to the gold.



The bases were originally planned to be liberally covered in big tall red poppies, sculpted from greenstuff. Such an ambitious vision quickly proved to be well beyond the capabilities of my greenstuff skills and patience at the time, and at the time there was no source of pre-made red flowers available to me, so the initial concept was scaled back to just a single red poppy growing out of the base of the Guardian champion, the unit leader pointing down at it dramatically to remind the whole regiment of exactly what it is they are fighting for.



The banner was much simpler to do, with the bigger surface area of the flag giving more breathing room for the device of a simple poppy. On the other hand, the banner is also why this unit was one of the two most painful and challenging headaches in the army.



See, like I've mentioned before this army was started in 2013, and this unit was painted the same year. In 2013, I was still following what Warhammer rules GW currently sold, and that meant 8th edition Warhammer.

Now, the important thing about 8th edition Warhammer is that it contains this massive collection of Common Magic Items, which are the commonplace magic items available to everyone. When you disembowel a giant spider or a troll or some other monster, it's normally one of these Common Magic Items that spills out of their carcass along with a healthy pile of gold and a healing potion or two. And in 8th edition Warhammer, the range of Common Magic Items is this enormous spread of colourful fun things like the Fencer's Blades or the Gambler's Armour or the Trickster's Helm or the Pidgeon Plucker Pendant or the Trickster's Shard or The Terrifying mask of EEEE! or The Other Trickster's Shard. And it's awesome and easily one of the best parts about 8th edition Warhammer (we don't talk about what the army books do with their magic items).

Eternal Guard of course are able to take a magic banner, and for these ones I opted for a Razor Standard. This is mostly because I was still very new and unfamiliar with Warhammer and how a lot of the magic items fitted together, and the Razor Standard on Eternal Guard was a popular photocopy special at the time. It is hard to go wrong with some nice simple extra armour piercing on a regiment after all, especially one that throws out as many attacks as Eternal Guard in 8th edition do.

Then from late 2014 to the end of 2015 I broke ties with what Warhammer rules GW was selling and began to pivot from 8th edition Warhammer to 6th edition Warhammer. This is important because the lineup of Common Magic Items in 6th edition Warhammer is different to 8th edition - there are fewer of them in those core rules. I was aware of this moving into 6th edition, but payed little heed to it, reasoning that the Common Magic Items I had chosen for the army would surely be in that edition too. 6th edition Warhammer might have fewer Common Magic Items sure, but it can't have that many fewer of them - after all, magic items are fun and cool, and you need lots of different Common Magic Items to fleece off to local merchant traders for gold, or to feed your blacksmiths and artisans for raw enchanted materials with which to craft more useful magic items with.

Yes there was a sad pathetic little list of basic Common Magic Items in the Wood Elf army book, but surely that was just a bare skeleton list, a short little cheat sheet listing a few of the most basic ones for quick reference. It couldn't be the entire list of Common Magic Items for 6th edition Warhammer. No fantasy game could possibly have such a depressingly piddly number of Common Magic Items. There had to be a more comprehensive list in the 6th edition core rulebook where the rest were listed.

And then...

Look at the Common Magic Item list in the 6th edition rulebook. Just look at it. Only one page? And no miscellaneous Enchanted items at all? Where's the Pidgeon Plucker Pendant? Where's the Terrifying Mask of EEEE? Where's the set items? What kind of joyless Sour Prude who hates fun wrote this thing?

The most serious problem here however was that this Common Magic Item list doesn't have any Magic Standards at all in it, except for the War Banner which is the most joyless and boring Common Magic Standard of the bunch. You would think that the Razor Standard, with its simple reasonable AP on the unit's attacks, would be safe and ubiquitous across all the editions, but no evidently even that one is too fun and interesting for whatever Sour Prude was in charge of the 6th edition Common Magic Items list.

And so, just like that, my Eternal Guard were not usable in the 6th edition that had so captured my attention.

This was enormously frustrating for several years. Eventually after a little experimentation I settled on replacing the Razor Standard with a Banner Of Dwindling, which is an army book item and thus guaranteed to be accessible in any Warhammer game I would be seriously interested in playing frequently. It also had the added advantage of being much more cinematic and evocative, and has generally been a much better magic standard all around, but still it's the principle of the thing that matters here.

I was just fortunate that such a chance was even possible due to where this regiment comes from, the Glade of Poppies, which by now had crystalised into a major centre of learning and scholarship, as well as a powerhouse of artifice and magic item production in the chunk of Athel Loren I had carved out for myself, the Meadows of Heaven (because what else was it going to be called with the origin of this army). Being a centre for magic item production meant that they have plenty of Magic Standards available to take into battle.

The Defenders of The Glade Of Poppies



Once the Glade of Poppies was the crown jewel of the Meadows of Heaven, second only to the capital of Imaginaerum in wonder. It was a centre of learning, knowledge and academia, filled with some of the wisest minds in the Meadows of Heaven, and for many leagues beyond, and many scholars could be found within it, passing their knowledge on and studying the world around them ever more. Its name came from the great blood red poppies that grew in the grass of its clearings and meadows. These were left to grow free, and so grew to be extremely tall, some even getting to be taller than the elf children that played around them. Some of the greatest and fairest Wishmasters of the Meadows of Heaven came from this place, and all studied in the Glade of Poppies at one point or another. The advancements and knowledge of those who dwelt there was put to good use in bettering the lives of all who resided in the Meadows of Heaven.

It was during Cyanathair's first attack against Athel Loren, at the very start of the Secret War, that the Glade of Poppies was ruined, as the glade became the site of one of the bloodiest battles of all those fought in the Meadows of Heaven. Hearing of the Glade of Poppies and its splendour filled The Corruptor with rage and hatred, and the creature sent a titanic horde of Beastmen and terrible monstrosities to raze and despoil the province. Massed rank upon rank of Eternal Guard stood against the onslaught, supported by hundreds of elven archers. Initially the battle went well for the Wood Elves, who struck down thousands of Beastmen and their vile allies. But still the horde pressed on, seemingly without number. The decisive turning point of the battle came when the strange shamans that accompanied the horde managed to work a great and horrific spell. With tremendous power fueled by the carnage and bloodshed unfolding around them, they managed to tear a hole between worlds, and from it poured a host of creatures born from nightmares, directly behind the elven lines. Caught between the two forces, the Wood Elves were trapped and the battle was lost. The elves fought on with the courage of true heroes, and slew scores of Beastmen and Daemons alike, but the combined forces arrayed against them were too large to fully overcome, and eventually only twenty Eternal Guard warriors remained, the tattered remnants from different regiments banded together for a final stand. They fought back to back against the overwhelming tide until all became blood and darkness.

When dawn broke the next morning, they awoke in the centre of the Glade of Poppies, surrounded by blood, bodies, ash and destruction. The horde that had assailed the place was gone, but the Glade of Poppies was devastated. Countless trees had been cut down, burnt, or torn apart. Spites lay pinned up with nails and spikes of hell-forged black iron, their forms broken and mutilated. Sacred stones lay toppled and desecrated. The air was thick with choking cinders. And every single one of the great poppies from which the province gained its name had been cut down and stamped on.
As the survivors saw the desolation, their hearts were filled with despair and grief for their once beautiful home. And so it was that they vowed that never again while they still drew breath would the poppies be allowed to be cut down again.

Since those dark times the Glade of Poppies has been healed, and blood red poppies once again grow free within it, though none have yet reached the height they once were. But the damage wrought in that fateful battle has left lasting scars amongst the Asrai of the Meadows of Heaven, and it is unlikely they will ever forgive themselves or the minions of Chaos for it.

The Defenders of the Glade of Poppies were first formed from the original twenty survivors of the battle of the Glade of Poppies, formally grouped together as a single fighting unit. In the years since its ranks have been filled from a combination of their descendants and other Elves of the Glade of Poppies who have survived terrible battles. trained by the remaining original twenty not lost to attrition.

The Defenders of The Glade Of Poppies typically carry into battle one of two banners. The Banner of Poppies is the only banner that did not fall in the battle of the Glade of Poppies, and was waved defiantly at the heart of the defence until the bitter end. The Banner of Vengeance was created to the same design in the aftermath of the battle, woven by the widowed maidens of the Glade of Poppies and given the most powerful enchantments to help their warriors in their quest to defend the Glade of Poppies forevermore.

The Forest has not forgotten the promise that the Defenders of The Glade of Poppies made so many years ago, and wherever they step foot blood red poppies, of the same variety that grow in the Glade of Poppies, are known to spring up and grow, seemingly in reminder of their duty.



Since then the Defenders of The Glade Of Poppies have served with distinction, proving themselves to be one of my deadliest units and the star performer of the army by far. They don't always carry the game, but for every time they've been decimated by a wave of gunfire and boiling lead or scattered by Fanatics, there's two more times they've ripped the throat out of the opposing army by routing the opposing centre almost single-handedly.

Needless to say this has made me awfully proud of them.

Damn, I love Eternal Guard.

I know the Wood Elf fantasy is supposed to be all pew pew twang twang, but these are so - cinematic. I believe you can find a trace of Darth Maul in them (yeah, yeah, the prequels suck, but when you're fourteen years old and he fires up the other end of that lightsabre it's firmly Cool As), and of course a lot of their DNA comes straight from Peter Jackson's vision of melee elves as a decisive, brutal mechanism of blades, but it's still recognisably a Warhammer unit, you know? There was thought given to "hmm, players who have a bunch of Wood Elf Spearmen around will need to use them as something" and the look and rules of the Eternal Guard are doing some work there as well.

Probably my favourite of the actual Wood Elves. I imagine in 2028 when James finally gets around to releasing the Wood Elves for TOW, I'm going to be in danger.

I love the work done on these. I'm going to be leaning in on 5th Ed. sculpts when I fill out our fledgling Wood Elf army. Pray for my wallet...