A/S/L

28/M/Sarf Lahndan mate.

What got you in to gaming?

When I was just an ‘orrible little lad, I didn’t have any friends, so I used to spend every evening in the library. One of the first things I picked up for my own sweet self was a Fighting Fantasy gamebook (I think it was Master of Chaos). I cheated my way through that one, really liked it, and must have been the last person to like it since the library sold off its entire stock a month or so later. I bought the lot, including The Ridding Reaver, this strange document that suggested you could do something like this with other people, and that got me started on Advanced Fighting Fantasy, and sitting around at school reading Out of the Pit attracted the attention of some lads with a Citadel Miniatures catalogue – this was 1995, when Tom Kirby’s “every schoolboy in England should have a football, some sort of games console, and a Warhammer box under the bed”. I never got into console gaming and I prefer sports where you get to stab people, but I did end up with a Warhammer box or two. Or more. Most of the lads got bored by the end of the year. I didn’t.

How did you come to be a part of Corehammer?

I found out it existed, liked it, bookmarked it, forgot about it for six months, found it again, said some nice things about it on my own blog, happening to mention it was a shame the place was so GW-heavy. Stevie stopped by with a comment and I, in jest and folly, said something like “so do you want a Warmachine correspondent then?” and yeah, here I am.

What gaming systems do you play?

Warmachine and Hordes; World of Warcraft; Magic: the Gathering; and a raft of RPGs, mostly Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Vampire: the Masquerade and a bit of old-school D&D or Pathfinder now and then. I’ve played more stuff… and I own a WFB army, but I’m still sulking about random charge ranges, Mysterious Terrain, Steadfast, the rise of 2400 points as the standard game size, stupid ‘your whole unit dies’ doom spells and what they did to Fear.

What are your armies?

Retribution of Scyrah and Mercenaries for Warmachine (if that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry, we can fix that); Vampire Counts for WFB; black/green, black/white and red/white for Magic; lots of Warcraft characters but my main’s a Monk; and I usually end up GMing the roleplaying stuff.

How did you come to be in to hardcore/punk?

When I was a slightly bigger lad with slightly more friends, I started taking an interest in music properly; bought a grab-bag of albums I’d either had recommended directly or seen mentioned online. One of ’em was The Light At The End Of The Tunnel (The Damned). I ended up more goth than punk (I’ve always preferred lounging about drinking snakebite’n’black to actually doing anything) but I hover around the fringes with a Bad Religion song stuck in my head. Never got into hardcore, for my sins, but I like a nice bit of thinking man’s three-chord speed freakery.

Have you ever done bands or zines or a label?

I pretended to be a promoter when I was running the grandly-named ‘Alternative Music and Culture Society’ at uni – which means I spent two years running ‘alternative’ nights in any venue that’d work with me, hanging around at gigs paying very close attention to the support acts and never being able to get any money out of the Students’ Union. Come the third year I packed it all in and pretended to be a publisher instead.

List the five miniatures that blow your mind the most

• Deathjack – this thing is the epitome of Warmachine to me. It’s bombastic, cartoonish and over-the-top; you plonk it down on the table and it’s just there, it means business, it’s this horrible spiky lump of overdetailed metal and it looks mean in a way that the huger, smoother, newer kits just don’t match.
• Ashlynn d’Elyse – look at her and tell me what she’s about. There are some models that tell a story and then there are some that are worth way more than the proverbial thousand words and this is one.
• Lord of Change – this thing got me into Chaos all by itself when it came out. It’s weird and warped and it doesn’t look like it should be able to hurt anything and yet it’s this huge presence on the battlefield. Shame about the stupid jester face on the staff though.
• Zombie Dragon (1994) – I can take or leave the bolt-upright very-1990s bloke on the back, but the dragon itself is a decrepit masterpiece. It’s either going to bite you or breathe on you or just fall apart on you and either way you’ll be dead and it’ll be necromanc’d back together. Can’t seem to find a photo of the nicely painted one from White Dwarf 217 so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
• Adrian Wood’s Dreadnought conversions – the models that awakened my young mind to the possibilities of scratchbuilding, kitbashing, and generally abusing kits to make something that looks miles better than what we’re told things look like.

List the five punk goth records that blow your mind the most

• The Sisters of Mercy, Floodland
• Fields of the Nephilim, Mourning Sun
• L’ame Immortelle, 5 Jahre
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, From Her To Eternity
• Nebelhexë, Essensual

List five awesome books

• Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast
• Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea, Illuminatus!
• Ursula K. LeGuin – Tehanu
• Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
• China Mieville, Iron Council

I thought this was supposed to be a music blog too, play us a tune then miseryguts!

All right.