Oldhammer

Classic 2000ad at that.

I'm another "old ish". Started in 94 but was reading my uncles old White Dwarf collection that he'd left at my grans before that in addition to watching far too many reruns of old scifi and fantasy shows and films.

Hey guys, 'member when GW didn't charge $50 for 30 cents worth of plastic? And $15 for a 4 inch segment of green stuff that costs like 5 bucks a yard at Home Depot?

Me neither.

I really liked old urban warfare cadians

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old 40k/fantasy artwork had so much character to them, I miss it.

While always relatively expensive (except for the very early days) at least there used to be more focus on the game part rather than just being a miniature selling company.

Also before the internet made it so easy to order anything and search about for better prices or cheaper alternatives sometimes paying a bit more was worth the extra hassle of travel/phone orders.

The same thing has happened to most Veeky Forums related companies. Because of branding, control and so on they all want to push "their style". Either making freelancers copy the company style or straight up having artists be in house.

Where as in the old days it was about freelancers being given a more general concept to work with and having a range of art styles within a product wasn't seen as a bad thing.

Heh yeah I spotted that.
I snagged a box of OG Terminators on ebay last week. I think I have the WD with the original rules somewhere.
Block Wars! Fuck yeah! Didn't Citadel do some JD minis?
Adeptus muh-shekel-us kek. Adeptus/Space Marine/Space Hulk were all £18ish originally...

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Goddamn I love that painting.

A fair few Dredd minis yeah.

>Joe Bananas

Oh my

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How old does something have to be to count as oldhammer?

Obviously like 3rd and earlier Fantasy, and Rogue Trader are but does it extend into the 90s?

we're almost in 2020 user

Of course stuff from the 90s is old

What do oldfags think about Primaris Marines?

Design wise they seem fine (the basic ones at least, some of the specialist models are shite). Size wise they correct for armoured giants in 32mm scale, but being closer to real proportions than typical GW "heroic scale" makes them look pretty weird next to any of the other armies miniatures.

Their introduction and half arsed fluff so GW can act like they don't have to bin the existing smaller marine miniatures is pretty shitty though.

Price wise the basic squads are typical GW overpriced. The characters though are ridiculously expensive, more than the 54mm all metal marine for Inquisitor was even adjusting for inflation.

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man that Primaris lore is so shit

and their specialist figures look too much like StarCraft terrans

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do you guys remember when everything was painted red?

...no? I mean, each faction had a red army, but not everything was Blood Angels

>he doesn't remember the red period

There was a spell where most chaos, SM or and eldar minis had at least some red on them. I can't remember exactly when, like early 90s late 80s maybe. Was like a fashion trend heh

all those red tyrandis

I see a red door and I want to paint it RED!

or the old red bows and red spear hafts of fantasy

I do miss the vibrant colours, but man did painting all that red fucking suck.

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Legitimate oldfag here. I still have my copy of Rogue Trader in a box somewhere. I remember painting up Johnny-era marines in Salamander colors when I was 10 or 11. Playing games on our dining room table with books and cracker boxes for terrain. As I got older I got more into the lore and my painting skills improved a little. You kids today with your Duncan and your /wip/ don’t know how lucky you are. Finding a local group to play with was tough, but the people who did play were generally less ‘neck-beardy’ than today. Those were good times.

But life moves on. As I got older, it became more and more expensive in both time and money to stay up to date with the hobby. Work and school (and eventually girls) took priority. I sold off all my armies and most of my books. I browse these threads out of nostalgia mostly, but every once in awhile I get a real itch to jump back in and show you whippersnappers how to do it. Some day.

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the old plastic was a pain in the dick to paint, especially because it lacked detail.

>White Dwarf & GW seems closer to the punk vibe
Yeah. This is so true.
RT was punk.
40k these days feels rehashed and self referential to the point it is no longer interesting.

I blame the writers for writing fanfiction instead of embracing the punk attitude of the early days.

Check out victoria miniatures.
Her arcadians basially look like old school cadians.

Dunno if I qualify. I got into it around the time 2nd edition transitioned to 3rd.

But I'll say I'd have been cool with GW coming out and saying 'ok we are gonna do truescale marines now'
I'm not ok with a halfassed lazy retcon that seems like no thought at all went into it.

>I sold off all my armies and most of my books
man, I understand selling the armies, but never would I separate myself from my old rulebooks and codexes

I second this. Going 'true scale' seems fine in principle, it's just against a looooong background of never adding anything new. The more I Scribd my way through early WDs, the more I appreciate the sweeping insanity that would accompany each new article. I don't know who the modern equivalent of those early anarcho/archeologists are (not hipsters), but GW need to find, identify & employ them. Of course I guess you can track down what they're all working on now.

Reading back through Rogue Trader, they consistently reiterate the importance of making up your own rules & trying your own thing.

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Ironic.
Orcs = Red, Marines Red, Chaos= Red, trees=RED!!!

not Oldhammer ENOUGH!!

hey man, remember that tyranids looked like when Starcraft was released

>I blame the writers for writing fanfiction
It's the end game of capitalist nostalgia. Rome will fall ((forever)). The Rogue Traders (& even THX 1138 Lucas) would have rejected it all.

Oldfag reporting in
the old index astartes were a nice thing and all the other books with lore additions
I find it kind of sad that they remove so many lore details and little things like lots of different IG character models
Why did GW went apeshit on lore, prices and only some factions again?

kotaku.com/5929161/how-warcraft-was-almost-a-warhammer-game-and-how-that-saved-wow

That's the point.

Blizzard "took inspiration" from GW for Starcraft, then today we have GW "taking inspiration" from Blizzard all over the place.

dude, I'm literally the administrator of a warcraft website with several million users

I know everything about how Blizzard copied from early GW. But people tend to forget that GW is also happily copying from Blizzard

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Da boyz!!! Damn Blanche invented as much of this as Tolkien.

Notice also how modern GW art only ever shows stuff you can buy minis of and protrayed EXACTLY like the minis look.

Gone is the wacky weird drawings of the Rogue Trader/3rd ed WHFB days.

From this to "Age of Sigmar"

Jesus Christ...

>I'm literally the administrator of a warcraft website
Your wife's son won't like this. (j/k)
>GW is also happily copying from Blizzard
Yeah the point is both these companies are morally bankrupt & just reuse content (actually I'd argue Blizzard have more new ideas) originally generated by a few guys from the 80s.

Millermind

I still have a few old books and codex. I know I still have Realm of Chaos somewhere and Freebooterz. But after you’ve moved 6 or 7 times, hauling around bins of books gets annoying. I sold off all my 1st and 2nd ed. D&D books and most of my warhammer books for a bunch of money many years ago. It was tough, but I’m hoping somebody else is actually using them.

TURN TO PAGE 94!!

You have succeeded in identifying a genre defining piece of art, x 100 Luck points.

Ian Miller is hands down one of my favourite illustrators. Nobody comes close to his weird, Holbein-on-acid style.

Had them on cassette. Wore the T-shirt’s. My favorite had the chaos star and Warmaster on the back.

> Oldhammer Thread

Obligatory link to the WD archive: mediafire.com/folder/tx4hcy4u487pv/WD

Fun story, I got some Oldhammer minis off ebay the other day (literally these guys ) and the sender had padded the package by tearing up an old WD and balling up the pages.

A little investigation revealed it was issue 303.

Miller and Blanche are both amazing, and had great insight into how the universe worked.

I honestly have such a love hate relationship with Blanche.

A great many of his full pictures are awesome and really important parts of early warhammer.

I've never been a fan of his "red and brown" sketchwork pieces though, with maybe a couple of rare exceptions.

He can be a little hit-or-miss, some stuff (like your pic there) is great and some looks a bit like he vomited on a canvas.

Painting my SoBs with bright red bolters makes me nostalgic. They keep the spirit alive.

I always think the red and brown give an ancient, yet spacey feel. I dunno why, might just be a strange association i have

Fuck knows how Les Edwards knew what Jon Tron would look like 2 years before he was born.

kek

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This reminds me, there's a small kickstarter right now by Uscarl miniatures for a squad of 10 not!Squats, 18 days left.

Also yes, that one is supposed to look like Chuck Norris.

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Newhammer here, Oldhammer stuff is pretty cool and atmospheric, but its art like this that keeps me away from falling for the nostalgia. Horus and the Emperor should look like superhuman warriors, not potato frankenstein monsters. Some of the other stuff in the thread is kinda cool, but this looks like something you'd find on the 12th page of a deviantart search.

>had padded the package by tearing up an old WD and balling up the pages.
savage.

Man. I really loved that magazine back in the day. Shame it went down the shitter.

things weren't necessarily better back then, but they were less... generic?

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Some of Blanche's prmarchs concepts really sucked imo. GW went ahead with them all of course.

yeah fulgrim looked super gay

>ut its art like this that keeps me away from falling for the nostalgia. Horus and the Emperor should look like superhuman warriors, not potato frankenstein monsters.
You have to consider the context.
Look at any other roleplaying material at the time. GW art blew most people away. And it's not necessarily technical execution, but the ability to inspire the onlookers imagination that made GW's IPs special.
These days the artists get the brief to only paint miniatures people can build from the boxes. The result is very sterile. You can see it when you look at the AoS stuff.
There is very little to inspire or get your imagination going.

I know a lot of illustraters around these days got into the field because of GW's work on that front.
You gotta remember White Dwarf was the magazine that also brought Dungeons and Dragons to Europe amongst other stuff.

Scale creep for one

this one particularly

WD's shift to all-GW-all-the-time was super controversial back in the day.

Don't worry if it was issue 303 then that's old but new enough to not be any sort of loss if it's turned into padding.

Early GW stuff had a huge range of quality, mostly I'm sure based on artists costs and printing costs.

Sometimes they would go all out full colour masterpieces, other times they just needed a quick little sketch to give players an idea of something and everything in between.

To me that range of styles is a huge strength, you might not like some of it but you can probably find something you like, find inspiring or make you think "no I'd have done it this other way".

>old 40k/fantasy artwork had so much character to them, I miss it.

I'm a fan of Chris Achilleos, who painted the picture of Taarna on her bird that became the poster for the movie Heavy Metal. I picked up his book Amazona, and inside I found this accompanying his painting entitled "Alien War":

>This picture was commissioned for a role-playing game, but to the best of my knowledge was never used. There is nothing else like this particular painting represented anywhere else in this book; a strictly science-fiction piece packing serious hardware. It's a rarity for me to paint such subjects, but it makes a nice change.

I adore this shit

People throw around hipster as a pejorative without actually thinking about what they are or what they value, and while the term is almost meaningless as a pejorative if you agglomerate urban (actual) millennial trendies and treechangers, their fashions and their values you get a picture of what hipsters actually are.

Oldhammer as a movement is pretty bloody hipster. I do not mean this in an insulting way, but look at the stuff hipsters value: good food, good design, community produce and locavorism, local food, local artists and artisans, community, community art, community arts scenes, etc. Look at some of the various fashions they've gone through, a lot of charity shop clothing and loud baggy jumpers, the whole flannelette old school workwear thing, dadcore- all acid wash jeans and daggy plain white sneakers, basically heavily nostalgia driven with a strong second hand component.

Similarly Oldhammer is driven by nostalgia, older values of DIY and creativity, older aesthetics, community, community content, second hand markets, small producers of bootlegs but also fantastic original content. All that needs to happen is more of the same. Games Workshop don't need to do shit, in fact, that is preferable.

Not only is it good that we have variety, I like those true scale marines, they are going to be great for skirmishes with my forgeworld renegade for instance. Also it is ideal that Games Workshop be as distant from Oldhammer as possible so that stifle small producers with the need to defend their IP or a desire to control the market.

Cont.

>Block Wars! Fuck yeah! Didn't Citadel do some JD minis?

That's not all. The fledgling Warhammer 40,000 sci-fi war game was joined at the hip to Judge Dredd.

Not so much peak Oldhammer, because that implies a high point before a decline, but perhaps galaxy brain Oldhammer would be the most hipster thing that could be done, as well as the most punk thing that could be done and that would be a zine. Not a webzine but a physical zine of community submitted old school art (none of that digital painting garbage but all that juicy pen and ink style, pencil work, prints, etc), articles, letters to the editor, showcases, anything you miss and want to see again.

Did he write that before Space Hulk/Crusade came out or did they just not tell him?

>Also it is ideal that Games Workshop be as distant from Oldhammer as possible so that *they don't* stifle small producers with the need to defend their IP or a desire to control the market.

Think I may be the oldestfag here...

Leeds back in the early 90s was similar, except the "bikers" were total fucking nerds. Half of them ended up in wheelchairs because of their other hobby, so I guess they had nowhere else to go.

Friendly enough, but clearly had too much time on their hands. You've never seen a pre-war machines Skaven army, fully painted, on finished trays... and there's a very legitimate reason for that. It's that nobody wants to paint 1500 Clanrats because they're not insane.

Looking back on the older fluff I get why it was so exciting back then, but it's also painfully reverential to the things that excited the writers. All that's changed is that they now have enough lore to be self-referential, if not reverential.

And that's not always a bad thing! All those mysterious references to half-forgotten wars that came to be characteristic of 40k (because if you look at the stuff that was just in the RT book, it's pretty much Dune without the messiah-wank) were either references to campaigns those fuckin nerds had played against each other, or to layers of re-writes of their own fluff, where details get left out and names and events get left in, just like real history.

40k lore is supposed to be infuriating. It's supposed to read like hagiography and propaganda. You're supposed to recognise that it's not giving you enough primary sources in-universe to make a real decision, and that things are being done in-universe by people who don't understand that either, just like real life. Because it's written by nerds, and nerds pay attention to that sort of shit.

When they're not crippling themselves on their rusty old bikes.

Got rid of mine when I found pdfs of them. Carrying them between games as a teenager was bad enough. It's the future, time to act like it.

When did that happen? I had no idea WD started as a general hobby magazine. I might actually have had a subscription if it still was when I played in high school.

>fulgrim looked super gay
I mean...