King Fluff: An Introduction

I thought I’d introduce myself as the newest member of the Battle Bunnies bloggers, my name is Ben, but I’ll be posting under the pseudonym King Fluff (you may be aware of my Facebook page or may have stumbled across my stuff on boards around the hobby internet).
I’m currently a University student studying a PGCE in primary education, which as you can imagine has sapped quite a bit of my hobby time just recently but I’m hoping that blogging here will give me the motivation to get some of my hobby projects to completion over the next year or so. I've also worked in high schools, colleges, as a graphic designer for the NHS. I've worked in a zoo and I've also worked for GW.

 Essentially I got into war gaming to make friends. Two of the guys I 'latched onto' collected but didn't really play, one collected WHFB Orks and the other collected Blood Angels and Empire. I remember the days enviously admiring fire dragons and paint sets until I took the plunge and asked for some models one Christmas.

I started collecting with the old skeleton horde box set and used Humbrol paints. They were painted with blue war painted skulls and were VERY shiny. 

I moved onto 40K and collected a custom chapter of space marines (something to do with dragons - Crimson Dragons perhaps) with the RTB01 beakies. It was all a kind of progression from collecting Star Wars toys and making airfix models (which I painted and hung from my bedroom ceiling with bits of cotton). In the 1990s I moved on to the Space Wolves when they were re-imagined with Ragnar Blackmane as their commander and a standalone codex. I was blown away by the models and at that point pledge my steel to the Wolf King Leman Russ. I spent hours and hours and HOURS copying the paint schemes from the codex and White Dwarf and I remember the particular challenges of doing the wolf skin diagnostic patch on the Iron Priest (which must have taken me a good 2 months to paint).

When I went to uni (the first time) I dropped out of the hobby for a while, I just didn’t have the time to continue but once finished I was keen to get back into it and I renewed my allegiance in my first job by starting a Warhammer club at the school I worked at, I picked up the Necrons army box of the time and they became my first fully painted 40K army. After this point I found my hobby growing exponentially, I had at least a 2000pt force for every army that Games Workshop made, but I only really found enough time to clean them, build them, base them and prime them black – there was a long period of me just having black armies, something that I’m keen to avoid again and I’m only now getting to the end of selling off all my surplus. It was around this time that I began to become aware of Forge World and its resin goodies.

For the battle Bunnies I’ll be looking at the plethora of inspiration tied up in the 30K universe, namely the Thousand Sons, Night Lords, Knight Households and Titan Legios of this heroic and epic era.

I was pretty early to the HH train, having been a collector of space wolves for a considerable amount of time I was really interested in looking at the flip side of the coin so I began converting a pre-heresy Thousand Sons army. This was around 2006/2007 so almost 10 years ago now, I spent many an hour taking chaos space marine, chaos warrior and space marine bits and combining them with plastic card strips to create the army, which (for the time – prior to any kind of HH armour or rules from FW, including the initial Badab sets) looked pretty good. At that time I got involved with the Tempus Fugitives led by the illustrious Stuart Mackaness, helping to shape their rule systems by playtesting and with The Great Crusade (then run by the now infamous Laurie Goulding) where we were blogging our armies. For the Siege of Terra element of the TF campaign in 2010 I decided to go all out and made my own armour variant space marines for MK2 – MK5 and formed these into a Space Wolf army, shortly after FW announced the Badab War books and released official models for the earlier marks of armour. Undeterred (well perhaps a little) I decided for the next event set in the scouring I would make a Mechanicum army. Lots of conversion potential and alongside that project I started making my own Imperial Knight models. As is the way, Games Workshop now make both these things in plastic (happy days), so being a little frustrated with ‘wasted effort’ and constant bolter vs power armour games I decided to start the Enemies of the Emperor project.

The Enemies of the Emperor is a ruleset for using any (and all?) alien and lost human culture armies against FW ruled space marines. Whilst writing the rules I'm also working on small 1000 - 2000 point forces of these great crusade era aliens and humans; Laer, megarachnids, scions of the storm, nurthene, nephilim, olamic quietude, keylekid, exodites, hrud, demiurg, interex and Jorgall. As you can imagine this is pretty exhausting, making the models from scratch and then painting them – so I’m hoping the other Bunnies will be able to help out in this respect.

I currently don't play very much (having two kids and a busy schedule) but currently my army of choice is Imperial Knights. I've always loved big, impressive models and these fit the bill quite nicely. I'm currently working on a gaming room in the house we just moved into and hope it will be complete over the Christmas holidays, I'm hoping home will be my regular gaming hang out apart from meeting up with the other Bunnies for campaign games.  As I said earlier I don't play very often, I do a fair bit of rules play testing when I do but I would consider myself more a collector than a gamer.

On a side note to the 30K focus of what I’m currently doing I’m also collecting Skitarii and Adeptus Mechanicum armies for 40K but I'm planning on these blending in to my 30K armies.
I also picked up an all tree Wood Elf army whilst working at GW which I still need to finish building and painting for a throw down with Templarscrusade01. (Ohh and I may have also got an all Khorne daemon army for WHFB too). If that wasn’t enough I’m also collecting all my 30K models in 6mm scale to do micro campaigns (and for easier transport – it’s not easy taking 5 reavers, 2 warhounds and 17 knights to a gaming venue)

Well that’s a little about me… I’m really flattered and excited to be asked to contribute to the Battle Bunnies and I’m very happy to have found like-minded people to truly unleash the magnitude of the Great Crusade upon the interwebs. My first foray for the Battle bunnies will be the Night Lords legion but stay tuned for some mad cap conversions, stompy titans, large scale terrain, lots and lots of MK2 and MK3 armour and possibly even the big E Himself. 

King Fluff