The tales of my demise were.....mostly exaggerated!

Hello! It has been 6 long months since my last post. I am sorry for the long delay, but the rumors and tales of my demise are grossly exaggerated! In fact, I have had a few medical issues, the first being a LONG overdue surgery to fix my bad hip. I had 4 surgeries when I was younger (12-15) and they led to a massive amount of nurgle rot on my hip, and I required a full hip replacement.....at 42! The Orthopedic surgeon I was lucky enough to get has been doing this for over 30 years, and told my mom and fiance as he came out of the surgery "That is the worst one I have ever seen." There was so much rot, that they could not even dislocate my leg.....finally my fiance found out why I was limping and just how much pain I have been in for the last 3.5 years!

Mine was so much worse than this one.....

That was not the dangerous part of all of this, as while I was preparing for surgery, I was given a new drug and had a BAD reaction to it. Anytime I get hot or take a warm shower I would break out in hives, and this led to 4 visits to the emergency room, two of which required immediate shots to my neck and tongue to stop me from choking to death. I have never been allergic to anything that I have taken, and we now have placed it as the filler in the drug I was taking (so not even the drug itself!). In fact throughout Jan/Feb, every time you saw me on the facebook group I was later itching and taking meds to fight off the hives. I guess we should be more careful of those chemicals the drug companies buy from China, huh?

Planning and getting an event off while I had all of that going on was quite simply impossible. I did get quite a bit of hobby time in, and I'll have some shots, things and stuff in a bit. But travel, etc was just not going to happen. In fact, on my recent trip to Chicago, my arm went into crazy hives just due to the sun through the window! Luckily, one quick pill and I was good for the rest of the weekend, and I have not had a recurrence since!

So finally after months of this crap, I have now been able to climb out of the Old World forest, having, hopefully, conquered the nurgle rot, with renewed energy and vigor!

In fact my first foray out and about was to go to Adepticon, a very large tabletop show here in Chicago. It does not have an Oldhammer element, but is pretty much the largest Fantasy and 40k tourneys in the states, I believe. The Fantasy Team Tournament had 128 teams, the Championship was two days and had 146 signed up, and the biggest tourney is a 40k 4-man Team Tournament that routinely has over 100 teams (and this year I think had 120 (or 480 gamers!)).

Adepticon! you can find out more at www.Adepticon.org. Maybe this can be the site of a Midwest Oldhammer day in the future!

My high school friend moved to North Carolina, and Adepticon is our chance to get together and throw some dice in the team tournament and generally have fun playing Warhammer. Unfortunately he was given the dreaded ultimatum right before he left..."Go to Adepticon or stay married." Of course he stayed married, so I had a lot of time to run around and visit the con on Wednesday and Thursday. I was also able to spend a little time helping Ronnie from Mantic Games out, assembling his figure cases and running a Deadzone Big Game. I had a great time, though did miss my friend.

But once again, it proved to me one of the biggest reasons that I want a cool Oldhammer event in the US - almost all of the armies were so similar. I do not know about other areas, but here and especially in the bigger US events, it seems that you are constantly seeing the exact same army, even though you know the players are different. And that is not a slight on any of the players skills (except for that Dwarf army that was spray painted gold.......and didn't even have three colors - and good on Dave Witek for getting upset about that!), but more a reflection of the limited pallet of figures the wonderful age of plastics have given the hobby. Once again, some of the armies are gorgeous and beautiful, but unless you are up close, you can not even tell which ones are which. Most of the basing has even started to look the same for certain armies. Even cool converted armies are easy to identify and once again are in the main just really cool kitbash. The similarity of the armies have turned them more into tokens or play pieces instead of incredibly detailed statues. Sure, back in the day, we also had some armies that were similar (most Khorne armies tend to have a few things in common after all ;) ), but those seemed to have more passion. Maybe it is the careless way that everyone grabs the casualties in grab lots, moving 7-10 figures at one time, a big handful of plastic. I am not sure. But it is different.

I attended and did play in the Team and Championship tourneys. We used my friend's army in the Team one, but for the Championship I took an old school dark elf army (with the old wheeled Cauldron from the 90s), tons of metal models. I did use the new plastics for the Warlocks, and the Kharbidysis, but other than that my army was all metal (except the horses). Of course, my painting is not the most excellent in the world, and Blue in Vt's "Works in Progress" are probably many stages above what I tend to get done, but I did get some compliments on my army, just because it was different. Mainly because it was not the cookie cutter of all the other 26 Dark Elf armies! And a few liked my Hydra and Cauldron. I'll try to get some pics up here soon - even if it is not really old school elves. One thing, I removed my casualties ONE at a TIME!

But I was also able to get in touch with an old friend, so I may have some exciting news now that my health scare is behind me, and I am back out in the light!