20 years after

He ran and ran, getting short of breath… He dived into the gutter to hide from the pursuers, he crawled into a sewer outlet. The twisted ones passed right by, grunting looking left and right, thankfully they did not notice him. There were more and more of these twisted creatures all over Mordheim, this was what became of the surviving population of the City of the Damned, damned indeed! They became more and more twisted and more and more numerous. No longer just the population but also all sorts of adventurers and bandits who came to Mordheim to claim wyrdstone, over time they all became twisted.

The city was burning again, there was almost always a fire somewhere! The sting of smoke and ashes was in his nostrils again, yet he barely noticed it, it was always present.

With a grunt Aenur got to his feet and went the opposite way. After two steps he stopped and winced in pain! The knee was acting up again, he stopped and grapped it with both hands and popped it back as he ground his teeth against the pain! After a little bit of bending and stretching the leg was working properly again and he ran down the street!

Aenur in the City of the Damned

He came to the burned out husk of the House of the rising Moon, luckily Mama Missery and her girls were out, so he could take a rest. He winced as he flexed his bad leg. The hip was acting up too! 20 years in Mordheim had surely marked Aenur the Sword of Twilight. In any other place, 20 years would be but a heartbeat in the life of an elf. He did not know if it was the constant battle, the immense amounts of wyrdstone or the constant exposure to the insidous influence of Chaos that did it, probably all three, but after 20 years here, Aenur felt old! He felt mortal like a man! His hair was all white and wispy. His body felt weakened , he was often out of breath. Now his knee, hip and back was acting up and hurting! He was but a shadow of himself. He feared that his hearing and sight might soon fail him too, surely things must soon come to an end, he was just not optimistic about it anymore.

He had to stay! The Shadowlord must be stopped. All this wyrdstone contained here and especially in the Pit must not be allowed to spread from the city to the rest of the world. Aenur wished to all gods of men and elves that there would come an opening, so he could get close enough to kill the Shadowlord or at the least help some adventurer in accomplishing it…

Now there was also the matter of the Moonchild! Things were getting out of hand and Aenur was so close to just give up and leave the city and everybody in it to their fate!

He heard a faint rustling behind him in the shadows of the building. That was the sound of something that was as good a completely silent, a breath, a faint stiring of silken robes, the wink of an eye… Fortunately his hearing was still ok… He held his breath and turned his head, ever so slowly and peered behind… There almost completely hidden in the shadows was a nightrunner.

The nightrunner jumped at Aenur the moment he realized that he had been discovered. He floated through the air, silent like a feather on the wind. Aenur saw to his horror that all of the lower half of the skaven was some warpstone glowing spectral glowing unmatter. That was one of Scurvy’s rats! They had exposed themselves so much to wyrdstone that they were now evaporating, caught somewhere between life and death! -Apparently they did not even know themselves. They were faster, more silent, able to slide through the tinyest holes and cracks. He struck fast like lightning, but Aenur was faster! In a split second, faster than the eye could see, he brought his sword up and skewered the skaven as he bore down on him. The elf may be old and tired, but he still had most of his speed left. Out of breath, Aenur stepped back, his heart pounding! With a wince he popped his knee back in place and looked out the window. There was an eerie green glow down at the street corner, Scurvy and his team was on their way. He fought to calm down and get control of his breathing and beating heart, he had to get away before all the spectral rats were upon him. 20 years ago he would have happily taken on  them all, now he could only handle one of them. A good thing it was not Scurvy himself, Aenur did not feel sure that he could best that old rat anymore. Scurvy looked to have been thriving in Mordheim over the past two decades, whereas the old elf rather had faded and grown old!

Back in control of his body, Aenur slid out of the back of the House of the rising Moon and soudlessly slipped round the opposite corner. Gone, as silently as a feather blown on a summer breeze.

Aenur being ambushed by the Moonchild and the Preyton.

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Mordheim 2019 has come and gone and what a weekend it was! We were about 20 hobbyists from all over the world, who met up in Helsinki to play Mordhein in celebration of the game’s 20th anniversary. Alexander Winberg of Echoes of Imperium was the instigator of this! A VERY big thank you, he did an incredible job of planning this whole event, gathering people, keeping it going and did a lot of work creating playing tables and terrain as well. This was the culmination of about a years work of hobby for most of us.

It was great to meet up with old friends and it was great to meet new friends. We had all had some dealings and communications with each other online, but it was great to meet people in real and put faces on them. Oh and we played some Mordhiem as well.

 

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We starting meeting up already on thursday, for a bit of an Inq28 game at the local Games Workshop store. There was Gregory, Eric and Adam Wier of Between the Bolter and me all the way from the US. There was Alexander Lunde from Echoes of Imperium and Sweden, Ana Polanscak of Gardens of Hecate from Zagreb. From Sweden: Alex Rambo Higgins, Jimmy Henriksson and Filip Petersson and of course Alexander Winberg from Finland. We met up for a bit of gaming and later on dinner and beer at the local bar. They have so many nice micro breweries in Helsinki, so we can really go out and taste all these fantastic and unique beers, we get spoiled for choice. That first evening we got to meet about half of the participants of the event, which was a good thing, because there were a lot of new people to get to know, so doing that little by little was the best. It was all very overwhelming, so not meeting everybody at once was a very good idea for all of us. Later that evening we was joined by Nicolas Grillet, newly employed concept artist at Games Workshop from Switzerland and Eric Blomman Blomqvist from Sweden.

It was great to finally meet people face to face! and chat and get to know each other.

Nicolas Grillet’s amazing fold out table. I have decided to try my hand at something similar for 40K

On friday we unpacked the terrain and miniatures in the conference room that Alexander had booked for us. A good thing that he works at a hotel! We did a few pick up games of Mordheim to familiarize ourselves with the rules a bit and to get to know each other a little better. A few of us had never played Mordheim before and some of us had played it a long time ago, but now only occasionally, which was the case with me as well. Luckily we had Jimmy Henriksson, who plays Mordheim recularly and knows the rules by heart. He was the perfect rules wizard to answer all questions and help out whenever someone was in doubt of anything. We all know the basic rules of GW games by heart, so movement, shooting and fighting is the same in WHFB, 40K2nd edition, Necromunda, Mordheim, Gorkamorka and countless other games. But every game has its own specific rules for building armies/warbands, for character development, experience and campaigning, injury and different special rules that help create the atmosphere of each game’s setting. These rules will all differ and that was what most of us had to familiarize ourselves with to some degree.

Great to see some of the original artwork. Ana sculpted a nest with storks based on this picture. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of her sculpt, but it can be found in the Gardens of Hecate.

During the friday we were invaded by fins! Mikko, Migs and Kari of Iron Sleet , Lassi Salminen and none other than Tuomas Pirinen who wrote the game! Then came Johan Egerkrans of Convertorum also from Sweden and Tammy Nicholls of Tears of Envy from the UK and John Blanche also from the UK. He did almost all of the artwork in the Mordheim Rulebook!

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If you are not already a follower of the blogs I have linked to above, I suggest you take a look at them. Apart from all their own original content they all have some great Mordheim 2019 content.

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Most of us had dinner together friday evening and Saturday the game was on! We had 9 tables to play on and tell different stories. We each had 2-3 games during the day against randomly selected opponents. I got to play on Kari’s fantastic Sleetheim table, that showed the city wall itself! My spectral skaven of Scurvy’s team joined forces with Alex Rambo Higgins’ vampire lady and her undead warband. We tried to attack the city wall that was manned by Kari’s averlander loot band and Jimmy’s Parade of Parody. We even had a smoke machine to create extra moody and foggy pictures. This was one of the best games I have had in years! We went slowly and relaxed, we took many awesome pictures with the smoke rolling in and we had a lot of fun! Many interesting things happened like when the undead and the Parade got stuck in a stalemate inside the city gate. Or my skaven warband, who entered the sewers to emerge at randomly selected spots inside the city. We had some great cinematic moments like when Kari’s warriors made a hopeless charge at Alex’ advancing undead and one of them, clearly a drunk passed his fear check and charged all alone, because his back up failed their fear check. Or when half my skaven warband made diving charges down from the city walls at members of Jimmy’s Parade. We had a shoot out between two towers in the city, one manned by two of Kari’s Averlanders and one manned by my sling-armed nightrunner. We all hit absolutely nothing! Great fun was had all around and in the end the forces of evil prevailed and gained control of the city wall!

Alex’s undead charge the gate as Jimmy’s “knight” is defending it! All the while smoke is rolling from our smoke machine.

After the gaming Tuomas made a presentation of the creation of Mordheim and the game’s history. There were some very interesting insights there and stuff I had had absolutely no idea of before. He will make the presentation at Ropecon the coming weekend 26th to 28th July. I can highly recommend watching his presentation if you are there at the con, or if it becomes available on youtube afterwards. It was a treat!

Very exhausted we went for dinner and drinks saturday evening. I tend to forget how tired I become when gaming on this scale!

It was such a great weekend! I had this creative overload! So many talented people gathered in one place! All the fantastic miniatures! So many conversions and paintjobs. So many miniature projects that we have been following online for the past year or so, finally seen in the flesh. Fantastic to meet some of my hobby heroes! and just hang out and have a good time together, privately. It was easily the largest gathering of “Blanchitsu” artists to date. We all agreed that it will be hard to top this one! Often when I go to big gaming events or painting competitions, I feel exhausted for days and end up in some kind of void afterwards, where I have to sort of digest all the impressions, before I can act on the inspiration I get from it. I certainly had to land after Mordheim 2019 and I certainly felt overloaded with inspiration. I even feel a little tired still! But I also feel incredibly reinvigorated! There is nothing like immersing yourself completely in a project like this for some days, to make you distance yourself a little from the difficulties of life. For me it has meant that I feel a lot more energy to deal with my own private problems, littterally because of the break from them that this weekend was. I also totally avoided the creative void I mostly wind up in after big hobby events, I have litterally been creatively reinvigorated and mannaged to act on my inspiration immediately. I worked on a showpiece for an article in The Illustrated Fantasy Artist, published by Figurementors . Right after that I painted a model I had built for Mordheim 2019, but hadn’t had time to paint… It just stood there all primed black…

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The whole gang of Mordheim 2019

Original artwork by John Blanche

Mama Missery in action.

John’s fleshy ghosts

Scurvy and Pontifex Greystab with the great tunnel drill of Doom, which is the means by which they made their way to Mordheim in the first place! Because they keep consuming all the wyrdstone they find, they never gather enough to power the thing for their journey home! So they have been stuck for 20 years.

Yep! I would have loved to bring the tunnel drill with me to Helsinki, but I did not have time to paint it, so it stayed at home. Just finished painting it today!

This has been a fantastic ride! A great game, tons of inspiration and good company! And totally exhausting! 😉 I just love to participate in such event games!

Sorry for the crappy pics in between they are from my phone and, as it turned out, way too cropped! It was just not possible for me to bring my big camera so I had to make do.

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If you made it this far, thank you for reading!!! I hope to be able to provide a little bit of inspiration for your own creative endeavors, conversions, paintings and games!

-Kristian