Grant's Wood Elf Host - An Introduction

Long time reader, first time participant, etc.

I’m Grant, and I’m just on the right side of 40. I live in Edinburgh, Scotland, and work in Higher Education. I enjoy whisky, wrestling, and war dollies.

I was a casual Warhammer player (4^th/5^th Edition) in my younger years, before taking the predictable late teens break. I got back into gaming in my mid-20s via Magic: The Gathering, and played in a couple of Pro Tours, and made the quarter finals of their World Cup back in 2015. This was my competitive outlet.

Fell out of love with the game shortly after making my second Pro Tour for a variety of reasons, but that basically boiled down to hating absolutely everything around the game bar actually playing it. I definitely had a finite number of 4 hour road trips every bloody weekend in me, and that tank predictably ran dry.

I got back into tabletop gaming via Blood Bowl, which was my first ‘proper’ gaming love. I couldn't get enough of the silly flavour, and the game that I got into (3^rd edition) was surprisingly deep for a game where Goblins slashed at Goatmen with Chainsaws. Getting back into it, the community edition of the rulebook was great, having balanced a lot of the problems of 3^rd edition, and I was lucky enough to have a local community in Edinburgh with an active league that didn’t require too much of a time commitment, and even better, scheduled games during the week rather than the weekend!

From here, it was a slippery slope. I tried my hand at the new AoS system, and even went so far as to build an army for it. The system never really grabbed me, and I really wasn’t a fan of how ‘busy’ the newer models were, nor how every army has a gigantic centrepiece. I’m a simple man – I like my war dollies minimal, and miniature. Any more than a couple of pouches on a rank and file mini, and I’m losing attention!

I stumbled back into the older minis of my youth at some point during this rediscovery of the hobby. When I restarted Blood Bowl, I wanted to play with the same miniatures I had used when I was younger, and then that turned into wanting to play with the ones that I’d seen the older gamers play with then instead. I’m pretty much the same in Magic, almost always going for the original printing of the card rather than the cheaper, newer version.

My current primary hobby outlet is Dungeons and Dragons. I play in a couple of campaigns, and run one as Dungeon Master. I’ve found this to be perfect for my ‘hobby butterfly’ style of painting, letting me paint just a few of a particular scheme before moving on to something completely different. I’m expecting the repetition to be a hurdle I need to overcome for this challenge. I’ll be trying to work in sufficient variation to keep my enthusiasm, as well as front loading as much of the repetition to the start of the challenge, where my enthusiasm will be at its highest.

I really like painting Elves. Their angular features fit (I think) very well with my painting style. One of my early lockdown projects in 2020 was the original Jes Goodwin Elves team, with the goal of covering the bases for all 4 Elf Team variants.



I had such a good time painting these minis that I thought that I could give this year’s OWAC a fair go. I already had a large quantity of Skarloc’s Archers from years back, and I’d picked up a couple of other pieces here and there over the years, planning on painting some of them for DND, and some just because I’d gotten a good deal and thought I’d get around to them eventually. The Wood Elves range offers a good deal of variety in gaming terms, but not so much in terms of miniature differences. There are a lot of Archer variants, and quite a few different types of Cavalry that it’ll be on the paint scheme to differentiate between. From an availability perspective though, I have nothing else that could be classed as an Army, and I view this project more as clearing out the backlog rather than adding to it! I’ve had to pick up a few bits here and there to fill out regiments, fill in blanks, and to avoid repetition, but for the most part, the project is in place!

Confession time – I’ve never actually played 3^rd edition, and it’s been over 20 years since I last played Warhammer Fantasy at all. I’m looking at things through heavily nostalgia tinted glasses, and am hoping that my lack of familiarity with the game can be an advantage for the project, as I’m picking things that I like the look of and want to paint rather than trying to maximise value, a nasty habit I picked up in my Magic days. The hobbies are very different to me, but it’s very difficult to un-learn habits that you internalise to the point that they become how you default to approaching games.

My intention with this project is to build a playable army. Not necessarily a good army, but one that complies with all the restrictions in the Warhammer Armies book. For the Wood Elves, this means that I need to include 1 Hero, and 30 Archers. Pretty modest, as mandatories go.

                                    

1 Sylvan Chieftain (level 20 hero) 168pts – Baneblade +5pts, Hail of Doom +25pts - 198pts

1 Wood Lord (level 15 hero) 128pts – Lance +2pts, Long Bow +3pts, Eagle +75pts, Hail of Doom +25pts -  233pts

1 Sylphseer (level 15 wzards) 203pts

1 Spellsinger (level 10 wizard) 118pts

1 Glade Watcher (level 5 hero) Lives in the Spear Kinband- 48pts

10 Archers – 110pts

10 Archers – 110pts

10 Archers – 110pts

10 Archers – 110pts

19 Warrior Kinband - Spears 1pt Musician and Standard Bearer 18pts - 208pts

5 Wood Riders – Longbows 6pts – 130pts

1 Beastmaster – 13 pts – leading 4 Boars 6pts – 37pts

1 Treeman – 280pts

1 Wight – 100pts

Total 1995pts
 
                            
                            

From what I can see, this list is legal. It has a little bit of everything, which I like from a aesthetic point of view. The realist in me knows that it’s unlikely that means it’s a good army though. Maybe it is. Who knows? I know I don’t! I do know that I like the idea of combining some of the heavier fantasy elements of the range in the Treeman and the Forest Spirit (Wight) with the more ‘mundane’ troopers.

So how am I going to tackle this project? It’s an awfully daunting list when I typed it out like that, and laid it out on the board! My plans are to have the Army in uniform. I know that uniform isn’t, but for a project like this, I’d rather it looked unified from a distance than as a group of disparate individuals. I hope that that will help me get the painting process streamlined, and that I’ll be able to reduce the per-model time I require. One concession that I’m making to my impatience is that I’ll paint each batch with different hair colours. I don’t expect this to accomplish much, but it’ll allow me a bit of variation among the models, which will be nice.

I’m using Skarloc’s Archers for my Archers. There are 8 different variations of these, so I’ll paint at least one of each for 5 of the 6 months, with a different hair colour each month. You'll notice from the picture above, I'm still short some of these, so I'll need to spend a little money on completing the units. I've got some already on the way, but this is where it stands at the time of the photograph. I’ll also paint a Wood Rider, and 3 of the Kinbands with Spears. I’m using the gorgeous Silvan Elf range for these. The models are immense, and look great ranked up together.

My character month will give me a break, probably around April or May, and I’ll try and get through the Eagle Rider, the Wood Lord, the Glade Watcher and the 2 mages, all of whom I plan to paint separately. That should leave me with enough time to paint the Treeman and the Wight (Forest Spirit) in this month too, as a sort of hybrid Wild Card/Leaders month.

I’ll need to find time in one of the months for the Beastmaster and his Boars. I’m hopeful that I can ride the wave of early enthusiasm and get them done in January or February. I think structuring the project in this way will allow me enough variety to keep my interest.

I would really like to get a game in at some point in the challenge, even if just to make a crack on learning the rules. A friend of mine has an absolutely gorgeous Chaos Army that I’d love to face, and another has been working on a Bretonnian force that, from a flavour perspective, makes sense if I wipe out at some point.

Time permitting, I’ve got rough plans to combine the Eldar Avatar, Orion, an Elf Bolt Thrower and Archaon’s Horse into a Centaur Lord, and I might try my hand at some prose to tie the army together narratively, but the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. For other stretch goals, I've still got a bag of Wardancers in the Wood Elf box, and enough for a good sized sword + shield Kinband unit as well. I can't see me getting to them, but they're there, in case of emergency. 

For my Overlord offering, I wanted to include something that could be included in my army, but I was given the brief of ‘Pink and Baby Blue’, which isn’t really something that Wood Elves are known for. I think I managed to hit it enough on Glam the Wardancer though, who I’ve painted with pink hair and blue fletching. This will be winging its way to Iannick shortly.

         

Genuinely delighted to be a part of this year’s challenge. I’ve read the blog regularly for at least the last 3 years, so being involved is truly an honour. Really looking forward to working on the project, and to see a whole bunch of new armies appear from nowhere. I always loved the ‘Tale of Four Gamers’ articles in White Dwarf, and this is a turbo charged version of that.

No instagram, but I'm @hislop_grant if you want to follow me on Twitter.