Ennui and on Matters Alien

So, lately I've been doing nothing. Well, maybe not 'nothing', but aside from listlessly pottering about on some commissions and slowly working on two miniatures for the Oldhammer Legacy project, I really haven't had the inspiration or motivation to engage in the hobby. The recent inclemently humid weather hasn't helped either.

(This is the point where my diatribe rambles off on tangents that will come together in the end)

I love telling stories. When I was first introduced to the worlds of the 40K universe, I held a particular love for the little fiction-bites you would find in the rulebooks and codices of the 2nd Ed era (especially the very funny short in the Ork Codex when they try to use a weirdboy to psychically probe an Imperial Titan). Yet perhaps it was the tiny panel-short in White Dwarf 195 in their Legion of the Damned article that really sparked off my imagination.

When I entered secondary school, I was lucky enough to find a very old and seldom used computer set-up in a dusty corner of the library that had since been supplanted by a shiny new bank of Windows 95 PCs. It had a black-and-green monochrome interface and a very basic word processor program. I spent many a breaktime on that computer, typing out little bits of fiction (whatever ideas came into my head) and letting my creativity run riot. I remember these were absolutely terrible and prosaic, but they were my first steps.

Four years later, when I moved out of my parents house and into my first bedsit, I was kindly donated a long obsolete Windows 3.2 PC set-up and spent many an evening with the television quietly muttering in the background, tapping out short story after short story (sadly all lost now).

I was first introduced to the shadowy organisation of the Inquisition in Ian Watson's Inquisition War trilogy (Boxtree edition) and in the very hot month of May in 2001, I was one of the first to pick up my copy of Inquisitor (the book and figures pack - the one that came with Covenant and Preacher Yosef)... since then I've created so many Inquisitors, belonging to many different Ordos and adhering to many different philosophies... but never one belonging to the Ordo Xenos.

I can't really lay my finger onto why this might be, but if pushed, I'd have to say that I find the Ordo Xenos less interesting than their adversaries. Sure, they can use xenos weaponry, but they're less hazardous or damning than daemon weapons and their characters just seemed less 'complicated' than their Malleus and Hereticus colleagues. Heck, even Eisenhorn and Ravenor, despite belonging to the Ordo Xenos, didn't seem to do much alien hunting in their stories.

When Shadow Wars: Armageddon was announced, the knee-jerk cynic in me instantly came to the conclusion that GW had been lazy in rereleasing (essentially) Necromunda but without producing any new models. However, that voice was swiftly silenced as I came to the realisation that GW had actually released a skirmish game that anyone with a 40k army already could join in with.

Since then, I've seen some very funky warbands being built, especially those made by Oldhammerers using RT era miniatures. I've also been reintroducing myself to the Alien universe in preparation for the new film, so when GW released PDFs for the other 40k factions, naturally I drafted up a tyranids warband (just waiting on miniatures). I also glanced at the Inquisition PDF too (which I believe was published later) and pretty much dismissed it because it focused solely on the Ordo Xenos, but it bubbled away regardless in the back of my mind.

Almost a decade ago now, I and a friend on the Conclave (back when the board was still black-and-green monochrome) concocted a grand IC xenos conspiracy story that sadly never came to fruition as it became a little too convoluted and we both had very busy real lives. Anyway, in this grand conspiracy, my characters were operating as the antagonists, but a few days ago, it got me thinking about what it would be like to be on the other side of that curtain and the first seeds of a protagonist were planted....

So what has this got to do with anything at all? In a round about way, I guess it means I'm currently designing my first Ordo Xenos inquisitor. I'm downscaling the original conspiracy to something less complicated (seriously, you'd have to a mind like Alpharius to join the dots of the original), working on character background and finding a suitable miniature....

Watch this space!

Спасибо за прочтение