Models

A handful of dice scatter to the table, their results determining how many shots have found their mark. The opposing player rolls his own dice to establish how many of his men survive the barrage, thanks to their armor. Nearly half of them survive unscathed. The second player is gleeful for a moment, but his face suddenly morphs into a look of mild horror as the first player announces that he will now fire his dreadnought's assault cannon at the second player’s unit of Ork Boyz. The mechanized warrior let's loose fully shredding six of the Boyz with no chance for the Boyz armor to make a difference. The Ork player’s jaw drops. The players share friendly jibes at one anothers expense.

Warhammer 40,000 (often abbreviated to 40k) is a futuristic table top strategy game, produced by Games Workshop in England. It uses an assortment of models to represent troops, monsters, vehicles and heroes. The hobby spans three continents (North America, Europe and Australia) with thousands of players involved. The story backdrop for the game (referred to as the “fluff”) describes a grim and dark universe where terrors worse than a human's darkest nightmares are a reality, hellish demons claw at the boundaries of reality, sadistic aliens enslave humans by the score, while demon worshiping cults run rampant. In the deepest darkness, only the brightest light may shine and it is these lights that become beacons of hope and salvation for their people.

There are three main ‘areas’ to the hobby itself. The first is the game itself. Each model represents a different type of soldier, creature, or machine. Many of these band together into teams, or units of a particular type of solder or creature. A squad of Space Marines for instance may comprise between five and ten individuals that operate as a single unit. Others, such as the massive lumbering Carnifex operate independently, but are still considered a unit. Each unit has it's own abilities and disabilities. Some units are very strong but quite slow, while other units are super-fast and can unleash many low strength shots, while still others are super-powerful with massive weapons of destruction but are limited in numbers. Massive armored vehicles that lumber forward with large cannons and heavy-caliber machine guns can be destroyed by a carefully timed bomb. Towering demons that shrug off the most powerful cannon shell lobbed at them may fall victim to an opponent’s psychic powers. The player must combine his various units into a coherent and effective army, each unit’s disadvantages being covered by their position on the table, or by another unit’s advantages. A fast-moving unit with many attacks but low survivability needs to be covered while it moves into position to do the most damage it can. Many people become engrossed in this area of the hobby, developing better and better armies by maximizing certain capabilities.

The second area is the painting part of the hobby. The models by themselves are either pewter or plastic and are either a dull grey or silver when they are first assembled. The art of taking that assembled model and creating its personality with paint can become a lifelong interest. Learning dozens of painting techniques such as mixing paints to achieve certain hues and shades, dry brushing to apply only the finest hint of a color upon the model and highlighting to exemplify a raised area such as the corner of armor or the edge of scale plate, is an art form of it's own.

The third area is actually building the models, or more precisely converting the models. Such an endeavor may be as simple as swapping a head from another model, or it may be as complicated as building a single model using dozens of pieces from several totally unrelated models and sculpting new pieces into it. Some conversions become so involved that the artist may literally be building an entirely new model that is unlike anything else. This is what drew me in to the hobby. The ability to create, and diversify. The ability to capture a moment in time, and the ability to give a persona to what has none.