Warhammer Seige Campaign

Throndin Groznog sat on his great iron throne in the hall of Groznog in Fortress Groznog deep in the Grey Mountains and, not for the first time, cursed the decision of his ancestors to make something he had to sit on for so long out of such an uncomfortable material.
Suddenly he was conscious of silence, and of all the eyes in the hall turning to him.
Pulling himself upright in the Iron Throne, and shifting slightly as a result of his piles, he cleared his throat.
"So, to summarise, we're buggered" he said at length.
"The rats have collapsed most of the mine-workings, the grobi are infesting our lower halls and there's an army of greenskins assembling outside our front gates? Anything I've missed?"
"No sire" wheezed Durfus Arkwright, possessor of  the longest and greyest beard in the hold "You have captured the situation most pithily"
"Our brothers from Karak Norn, when do we expect them?" demanded the Lord
The other dwarfs shifted uneasily. 
Eventually Thane Ward, leader of the Groznog Ironbreakers spoke up.
"Lord, the last time we discussed the situation you said we were to shave you and call you Susan before you'd ever send for help"
Throndin turned a malevolent gaze on the Ironbreaker thane.
"Who said anything about sending for help?!" he roared "Our krut fondling cousins still owe us for the last lot of ore we sent - send a message that I want my debt repaid. Now!"

As any casual perusal of this blog will show my primary gaming love is Warhammer Fantasy Battles. However last year my erstwhile employers and former colleagues at GW decided, in their infinite wisdom, to destroy the Warhammer Old World I'd happily been gaming in for 30 years and replace it with the Age of Sigmar.

Now I've tried to like AoS, I've played a few games and they were jolly enough, but what they weren't is Warhammer. And more fundamentally to me as a "story driven" type of gamer the background was puddle-shallow, portentous, whizz-bang empty drivel. Rick P was the wellspring of the imagination, vision and humour of the Warhammer World and whatever the skills and talents of those left behind at GW, writing compelling, interesting and engaging background isn't one of them.
Oh and the aesthetic of the new models is shit not to my taste.

So Steve and I have spent the last several months playing this, that and the other, having some 40K fun, messing with Frostgrave and Lion Rampant. However as we convened for our next game I finally realised something.
I *miss* Warhammer.
Yes it wasn't perfect (very far from it in fact) but it had charm and wit and the familiarity of a comfy old pair of slippers. And the models were (mostly) ace and not the sleek, soulless but fussy things GW seems to be replacing them with in AoS.

I guess this makes me some sort of Oldhammerer. Which is a bit worrying as I've always considered Oldhammerists to be rosy-tinted spectacle wearing wargaming equivalents of CAMRA - constantly harking back to how things aren't as good as they were in the old days when everything was black and white and fashioned from Bakelite and wood - who viewed modernity and progress as dirty words.
This is an opinion I still hold. But I miss Warhammer and want to play it, so if that makes me an Oldhammerer who am I to argue?

Of course just playing a game of 8th edition would be a bit too simple. As it happened, while Googling for something I found one of my own write ups of the Sigmar's Blood campaign that Stephen and I played through a few years ago. We had quite a lot of fun and Stephen and I painted up all the models and played through all the scenarios.
I suspect however that we may have been the only people in the entire known world to have done so as GW never produced another supplement like it.

So I wanted something a bit like that, a series of linked games that would get me painting and collecting a bit more. However I also didn't want to have to write it. And then I remembered Warhammer Siege. It's not something I've ever played (siege games are not generally the most interesting to try and game out) but I remembered that the old 4th (or 5th) edition version of the Siege book had a simple campaign system and a bunch of scenarios that weren't just "hurl yourself at the walls". So I suggested it to Steve.

Fortunately he's as foolish as I am, so before I know it we've agreed to play a Siege campaign, with the classic Warhammer pairing of Dwarfs (me) and Orcs and Goblins (him).

It probably won't work properly and we may never get to the end of it, but it has to be worth a shot.

Warhammer is back on the blog, baby!

Stay tuned to see how it all pans out.