Preface
I first experienced the Games Workshop back in the early-to-mid 2000s. My memory's a little hazy, but if I'm recalling correctly my aunt and uncle were in town in Newcastle and I was dragged to lunch or something similar on the Hunter Street Mall. On a whim, I asked my dad if we could go into the Games Workshop store – the Newcastle Warhammer store is still in the same location 20+ years later, despite it already being in pretty terrible condition the first time I set foot in it.
So in I walked, and was greeted by the staff there. As opposed to how many Warhammer stores run today (one employee, outside of major shopping malls in a lot of cases), GW stores of the 2000s had a number of employees and were even sometimes in major shopping centre chains. I digress a little, but the more plentiful employees meant there was almost always someone on hand to help out the clueless tween who'd just turned up. For some reason, I decided that I'd paint a Warhammer Fantasy Battle (rip) model – an Orc, but learnt to play 40k instead. It was way back in 3rd edition at the time, so my introductory game was Space Marines vs Dark Eldar (now Drukhari).
As with many children coming into 40k, I was drawn to the Marines, and most of my early years playing the game involved Marines – first with a homebrew, white and red chapter I called the “White Tyrants” (hmm... thinking back now, that wasn't the most ideal name for a chapter I could have thought of. After working on the Tyrants for a while, I realised that white is really hard to paint well when you have absolutely zero artistic talent. So I scoured the internet, White Dwarf and just about every other resource I could get my hands on until I found my next chapter: the Dark Angels.
The Dark Angels had something cool and mysterious about them. The Deathwing paint scheme is also super cool (and slightly easier to paint compared to white). And I kicked on with them for a good few years, building up an army that probably topped out at about 2,500 points in size. But over the years other interests caught my attention, I struggled finding people my age and play with, and I stopped playing, painting and collecting. I always maintained interest in the hobby and the universe, and I even had another few attempts at starting up again (notably with Astra Militarum and T'au armies) but I never really got anywhere with those attempts.
Over the last couple of years in particular I've been really considering giving the hobby a red hot go again. By chance, I was hanging with some friends of friends about a month ago when I overheard them talking about building their armies. I had no idea I even knew anyone who collected, and the knowledge that there were a few people fairly close by that did (including one that had fairly recently started) gave me that little push to get started at the hobby again.
So I embarked on the new journey in earnest. But all my old paints and models were long gone, I hadn't played in 5 or 6 editions, and I didn't even know what army I wanted to collect. The Games Workshop landscape has changed markedly over the 10+ years since I played. So I had a bit of exploring and learning to do.