From Padded Sticks to Painted Minis
When Warhammer 40K 6th edition came out, I wasn't playing 40K very much. I didn't have a very reliable place to go to find games, and where I did have was a not-inconsiderable drive. What changed all that was involvement in a LARP.
I'd first started larping back in the 90s with Live Action Vampire. In 2001, a friend from Vampire brought me to my first live-combat boffer larp. I got hooked and attended hard for a couple years, then drifted out. A few years back, I jumped back in with both feet. Started going to the weekly fighting practice held at the University of Connecticut by the Society for Medieval Arts and Combat - SMAC (see what they did there?). My first year back, early in the fall semester, SMAC held a gaming night. I went with some board games, but no one was interested. Everyone was either playing Magic or getting involved in Pathfinder. Since no one wanted to board game, I jumped into Pathfinder. It turned out to not just be a one-evening thing, but the beginnings of a campaign that is, as of this writing, still running some 3 years later.
We went through a few locations for Pathfinder before settling on where we currently play. The GM's best friend's family owns a small commercial property in a small town. The store in the worst location went vacant, and the best friend's father made it available to the best friend and the GM for their costume-making (cosplayers both). This proved to be important, because it's a lot of space that could be put to other purposes. Due to the purpose it was initially put to and the below-ground level location, we dubbed it the Crafting Cave.
We'd been meeting every other week to play Pathfinder for a while when one of the other players mentioned he'd just started playing 40K. He and I got to talking about 40K, which got some of our other Pathfinder friends interested. We staged a demo game before the next Pathfinder session and got a couple converts.
I like to encourage new players when I can, so I collected a bunch of stuff I had lying around that I was never going to get around to using, so I brought it to the Crafting Cave for the newbies to have. I told other friends about this. Those friends had been 40K players back in the 3rd-4th ed era, but had dropped out. One in particular gave me an enormous amount of stuff to pass on. Among this haul were Eldar, Sisters of Battle, and enough Tau for three people to play. Later, that same friend gave me his Chaos Marines collection - which proved to be quite extensive as well. Two of my Pathfinder friends got hooked on the Eldar. One became a Blood Angels player. The one who'd sparked this whole process off by mentioning 40K plays Imperial Guard. The Pathfinder GM tried to remain aloof, but the Sisters of Battle army called to her, and now she plays that and Chaos. The best friend held out longest, then she found out about the Space Wolves. Now her Thunderwolf Cavalry is the terror of the Cave. Oddly, all that Tau stuff failed to find a taker. We've had some people dabble with it, but no one has claimed any of it as their own. Suck it, you blue fishman space commies!
