Save the Craftworld: Episode 1

As with most gamers of my generation my initial exposure to wargames started through board games.  There was Hero Quest, followed on by Battlemasters, etc.  At the time I was still fully enraptured in the lure of toy soldiers.  My father was a toy geek and he helped me acquire quite an army of plastic men.

One day at a hobby shop I stumbled upon a box of plastic space marines and thought they were, more or less, toy soldiers.  I didn't realize I'd have to assemble them and eventually paint them.

This began a 14 year span of playing Games Workshop titles, slowly going from playing toy soldiers to playing wargames with said toy soldiers.  After a brief affair with Space Marines I settled on Eldar as my army of choice.  The 2nd edition codex was superb and the story/logic behind the Eldar was fantastic.

I amassed a couple of different Eldar armies, finally ceasing in mid 3rd edition (maybe early 4th, I can't recall).  Advance nine years to now and I've decided to give Eldar another go.  I've no interest in playing 40K but I'm going to collect and build an Eldar army to either play retro 2nd edition 40K or find/build a suitable alternative.

The marines from the Mentors will be sold off to help fund the space elves.  I've never really loved marines, but the project was fun to do.

The following posts in "Save the Craftworld" will detail newly purchased kits (no resin!) and reclaimed ebay fodder such as that seen below.  I've another half dozen ebay bids on the way.  There are certain figures/metals which are just too expensive to buy because of the resin blite that has destroyed the Eldar aspect warrior line, but I'll see what I can manage.

The below sets are being noted down for before/after photographs.

Old single piece cast metal scouts.

These two sets of five were two of the more common guardian poses with the shuriken catapults (remember in 2nd ed. and RT the guardians came standard with lasguns and shuriken catapults were an upgrade)

I can't promise a speed result on any of this stuff - I'm once again in the process of relocating/changing jobs, but I'm looking forward to a new table full of Eldar.

I set an old rhino chassis and the above Eldar in some Super Clean to begin the stripping process.  The rhino will be sold along with the marines.  I clipped the slottabases off of the Eldar (they'll be on 25/40mm renedra plastics) and removed some plastic bits added by a previous owner.  I'll be brushing these to see how good the result is shortly!