Bringing an Old Green Friend Home

 

I haven't talked about it a ton on here but I have been working on Warhammer fantasy stuff for The Old World - and just because I like it. That older aesthetic from the 80's/90's/early 2000's still means something to me because that's when I got into it and played it quite a bit. I've always loved the "Orcs & Goblins" army and I've worked on one quite a bit over the years but never quite finished much of it. When we started playing Kings of War I played them quite a bit but that eventually faded and everything went back into boxes and on the shelf. 

I started out with 2nd edition and we played some of that and 3rd but we didn't have a lot of miniatures so we played with D&D minis, plastic dinosaurs and knights (sometimes sprayed in different colors), and the large pile of cardboard counters from TSR's Battlesystem 1st edition boxed set got more playing time as Warhammer units than they did in their own rules. 

This one is before I converted to Orc & Goblinism but I do remember it being around back then

By the time 4th edition rolled around the game exploded and the figures became much more widely available and my friends and I started building actual miniature armies, alongside out existing 40K armies and our Epic armies and our Battletech armies ...

It may have some out in 3rd but I found it in 4th and I still have at least two of them. 

The 5th edition was pretty similar rules-wise and we kept right on playing our ridiculous hero-hammer games with over-tooled heroes and monsters.

AZHAG! This guy was my general in most of the battles I fought with the green guys back when and I loved him. Mean in combat, mounted on a mean beast, and able to cast spells because of his magical crown - expensive, but worth it!
Think I still have two copies of him too.

For me Warhammer 6th edition was probably the peak and it toned down the overpowering of individual models quite a bit and felt better to us overall as a wargame. Around the time it came out the greenskins got a new "flagship" in the form of a new Warboss on a Wyvern.

No more sinuous, serpentine wyvern - this guy is a thicker, more brutish take with an underbite - more orcish for sure.

For whatever reason I never managed to get one of these. I mean, some might ask "well how many orcs on wyverns do you need?" to which I would respond "one of each at least, right?" - and now I finally have him. They are not exactly rare but I never ran across one that was a)the old metal version and b) not either badly painted, missing parts, or priced like an art object and not a gaming miniature.

But I finally did find one like that and since I'm working on the orcs in between the 40k stuff I realized it was time. It had become a bit of a Holy Grail thing for me as I wasn't sure I'd ever find one clean and complete. But now he's here and I'm very happy about it. I'm going to try and get him built and primed pretty quickly and then agonize over how to actually paint him for an undetermined period of time but I do have some ideas so it may not take that long.  More to come.