Amassing an army…

For a very long time, I held a remarkable record in gaming. I had the same character for 18 real months of campaign, gaming almost every week. For those of you familiar with Warhammer 3rd edition (and if you’re not, get familiar, you’ll love it) I had over 40 XP with Candy. She would kill or heal with relative ease. I knew her in some ways better than I knew myself. I used her life to help me work out issues with my own. She was another version of me. I loved playing her.

Everything eventually changes or ends. It came time for Candy to retire. It was the only right decision for her, really. She just married the love of her life, they adopted a daughter. She needed time to be with her family and recover from all the bad stuff that just happened. It was cool. I was cool.

Rel was my next character. Putting on someone else’s skin was harder than I thought, and that part of the story was very dark. A few games before it happened, I had a good idea how it was going to end. I was right. Surrounded by guards, about to be captured, Rel killed herself. It was the right decision. I was still cool, but anxious to create a character I could be with for a while.

So Jason allowed me to just pick a class, something that normally people have to do by random in Warhamer 3rd Edition. I wanted to be a wizard. I had never tried anything like that. Together we decided my character would be from Kislev, and an Ice Witch!! I created magic cards unique to my background and read extensively on Kislev. Last night, I lost that character, too.

Now I have to create another character, this one temporary to finish out the mini story we are on, and then likely another character when this arch is over. Yep, that is 5 characters in 4 months. Sigh.

My response is perfectly logical. I am going to amass an army. Now this is not like my friend Eric’s character army. When he was younger he got bored and rolled up over 100 characters. He created so many that our friend Wil created a special dungeon whose sole purpose was to kill those characters off. My army will not be characters. My army will be a troop of female miniatures, so I have a great mini for any new character I need to create. Two by two, like the arch, I will get at least two of every race and class I am interested in playing. After all, a great female mini is hard to come by (which would make a great blog topic). I have been on Reaper’s website www.reapermini.com for over an hour now making my list of possible figures, and earlier today I bought my first two. After all, games are unpredictable. The least I can do is be prepared.

Now while creating an army of minis is a little extreme, have you ever bought a mini because you thought they looked cool? Have you ever created a character based on a mini that you love? I find myself now wanting to play a game with vampires just based on some of what I’ve found but first I need to create a warrior that can deal with the Chaos Wastes, and hopefully survive the next two or three games…