goblins for a friend

My friend Matthew passed away a while ago. In reality, we weren’t all that close personally; he was a member of groups I was a member of, and a good friend of some good friends. I knew that he had been having health problems, but it turned out that they were much more serious than I’d realised.

Anyway, Matthew, like me, was an Oldhammer enthusiast, although I’m not on the same level as him. He had been working, on and off, on the idea of staging the classic Warhammer Fantasy Battle scenario “Blood on the Snow” from White Dwarf #91. The idea was to host the game at Bring Out Your Lead (BOYL for short), the annual gathering of the UK’s Oldhammer community.

But then we lost him. And so a group of his friends got together and decided to stage the game in his memory. Because the models weren’t finished, it was decided to split them up and have members of the group paint the unpainted ones. I was assigned 20 goblins with light armour and shortbows, figures that I believe were donated to the project by Old School Miniatures. These were sculpted by the great Kev Adams, I believe from Matthew’s designs? Anyway, they’re nice.

The catch was that BOYL got cancelled, and the game was instead going to be played at an event I wasn’t attending (stay tuned here for more about what I was doing that weekend), and I was in the US for a while before that, so I had a pretty short period of time to paint 20 goblins.

Backdrop by Jon Hodgson!

I was once advised that the essence of speed painting is “faces and bases,” and here that was definitely true. Lovely Kev Adams faces, some GW snow texture that I inherited from a club member who was moving out of town, and just Contrast paints and washes for the rest. I wouldn’t look too closely at some of them, but en masse I think they look quite nice.

The game did happen, and if there’s a BOYL in 2027 it’ll run there as well. This time, hopefully, I’ll get to play (although, in all honesty, I don’t love WHFB 3rd like the rest of these folks do. I think they’re just used to it). But the important thing for me was getting to contribute creatively to this memorial act of … I don’t know, fellowship. It seems silly to celebrate a man’s life by playing a game, but if the game was what connected us, then I suppose we’re celebrating that connection.

Sorry you couldn’t see them on the table, Matthew. They might not be up to your standard but I don’t think you would have minded.