Oldhammer, Newhammer and Everything Else!

Hi!

Well I'm back from my holidays, somewhat more tanned and raring to get some painting done. If only I had a holiday! Sadly I have a fairly full work schedule at the moment so finding time for hobby related malarky is going to be difficult but I am trying to get on with painting up the odd bits and bobs while I can!

The British Summer... 

While driving up from Portsmouth in tropical sunshine and heat followed by the traditional Midlands downpour and between listening to far too much Doctor Who audio books, I had the opportunity to ruminate on my hobby and the differences between Oldhammer, Newhammer, retro gaming and all the other fascinating different versions of the wonderful world of wargaming.

Now I've been a gamer but more of a painter of figures since the early 90s and even then my 2nd edition 40k Imperial Guard contained precious few actual GW figures, instead that long ago sold off but glorious force that never won a single game consisted of everything from Nexus Marines to plastic Havok figures.

Corporate Mercenary

Ever since then, I have found myself more than happy to pick and choose whatever ruleset I fancy playing and using whatever figures I have to hand which has resulted in me compiling a really eclectic selection of rulesets and figures ranging from Vor, Void, Kryomek, Aetherverse, Star Mogul, Necromunda and Rogue Trader to name but a few!

Warzone Brotherhood Elite Troopers bump into a Mechwarrior Mining Mech

This brings me onto my reason for posting this article! I firmly believe that variety adds spice to life so to make the most of my meagre gaming budget and now sadly much reduced collection, I am going to embark on my Budgethammer project.

Essentially I will be using a whole load of absolutely brilliant rulesets that could do with a little attention and at the same time showcasing some of the equally lovely figures that are or were produced by other companies during my golden age of miniatures!

For example, theres VOR; The Maelstrom, a rather interesting ruleset that covers a pocket dimension that has swallowed the Earth and many other planets from across the galaxy and is slowly sweeping them to their doom. Its a great setting and has some really unusual forces for it such as the mighty Growlers:

Grr and indeed Aargh!

Sculpted by Kev Adams, the Growlers are fantastic miniatures and look the business once painted up and even better, they make perfect monstrous foes in Rogue Trader or Trolls for Fantasy Battle!

As theres so many blogs out there covering some of the beautiful sculpts of the 1980s, I'm going to cater more towards the 1990s and early 2000s and a time when Games Workshop produced super bright colour schemes, Orks were humorous, and for the first time other gaming systems flashed into existence, sparkled briefly and then vanished almost without a trace!

Budgethammer as I am calling it for lack of a better term, is going to be my ongoing footling around with figures from all sorts of places but on a budget that only a the son of a Scot and a Yorkshireman could think generous!

 OOK! All good games should include superpowered and angry Apes!

As previously mentioned, I have a budget of £15 a month, combined with whatever I have in my leadpile and bits boxes and with this I hope to be able to build some small warbands and play some games that I have in my bookshelf or saved to my computer. I suspect I will mix and match settings and forces, stealing generously from whatever I find interesting and generally have fun with my hobby rather than worrying about the correct figures and whatnot!

Mining Robot

Theres probably going to be quite a lot of Rogue Trader as its one of my favorites and the first ruleset I bought but at the same time, I really want to relive the fun of Star Mogul, the shoulderpads of Warzone and numerous other games I played in my teens and early twenties.

Hopefully during my random wanderings through about twenty years worth of rulesets and figures, I will help showcase just how much fun one can have if they just play for fun and collect and paint what they like!

I do want to say that I am not hinting that choosing to use any specific ruleset, era or range of figures is wrong, just that its something that I just can't do, be it because of puny budget or the ooh shiny syndrome that forces me constantly wander off on a tangent.

Union Marine

Sadly I'm going to be working pretty much solid so its going to be a rather irregular sort of project that I will update as and when I have time to paint stuff but I do hope to be able to start posting battle reports, rulebook and figure reviews soon.

There is going to be one proviso though, I am going to be catering to the less serious military sci-fi and more towards science fantasy and small skirmishes as they are what I find more fun to play. My 15mm scale Battletech project is going to be somewhat more serious but more on that at a later date!

In the meantime, all the best!