#I love Khentimentiu he tries SO HARD

[wtf-skittens]

Skits, how did you get into warhammer40k?

TL:DR version: Via my university librarian and the A Thousand Sons novel, mostly. XD

Long version: I was at uni studying games animation, and one day sometime in 2009 I noticed my uni librarian, a bloke nicknamed Dingo, painting some miniatures during his lunch break. I was all ‘hey that looks cool’ and he was like ‘yeah wanna try it?’ He dug up some random lil tyranid for me to test paint, and it turned out I was pretty good at it! (twenty-odd years of prior art experience probably helped XD). I also quite enjoyed it, and it was a good way to kill time and rest my brain between classes. (It also led to Dingo having to often remind me to breathe, because I would legitimately forget to do so regularly while painting. ¬_¬ I am not a clever man)

So I ended up painting one of his several armies for him, a Tzeentch-focused Chaos Marine army he called the Heralds of Change. One of the squads in said army was a squad of Rubricae, and because I really liked the blue and gold of the box art, he let me paint them that instead of the purple and silver of the rest of the force. This army kinda became ‘mine’ while I was at uni, since I’d painted all of it. ;) 

There were other people at uni who also played 40k, and a lot of them kept their armies in the same side-room of the library that Dingo kept all his (plus terrain) in. So it wasn’t uncommon to find people playing 40k between classes and such, and ofc I ended up joining in as well, using ‘my’ Heralds of Change army. Through them I also started playing the Dawn of War computer games, and eventually started reading the Horus Heresy novels. By this point I’d been enjoying the 40k hobby for like a year without paying a single cent of my own money. XD Good times. 

And then I read A Thousand Sons, and absolutely fell in love with the XV Legion. Damnit. So that’s about the point where I went “hey I’d like to make my own Thousand Sons army!”, and Dingo gave me that original squad of Rubric Marines and their accompanying Rhino that I’d painted to help form the core of my fledgling army. They were soon joined by a second Rubric squad + Rhino, a Defiler, a Vindicator, a Land Raider, the metal Ahriman model, a big ol’ winged daemon prince, and a Forgeworld Thousand Sons dreadnought. That dread was my first real foray into sculpting anything with greenstuff, and again, I found out I wasn’t terrible at it. XD Then I got myself a squad of chaos terminators, but I decided I wanted to make them look more like the 30k TSons artwork in the Collected Visions Horus Heresy artbook. So that squad was my first attempt at major conversion, and despite all the things I’d do differently with them now, I’m still quite proud of them.

Now, during all the games I’d played, the sorcerer model of my second Rubricae squad developed something of a reputation of sucking hardcore. The dice seemed to specifically hate his face. He’d fail to hit or wound anything; he’d be the first in the squad or army to get killed by the enemy, or he’d fail a psychic test and die horribly, or he’d explode into giant chicken-daemon which would also fail to do anything useful before getting killed messily, etc. etc. So we nicknamed that one particular model Kenny. “You killed Kenny! AGAIN! You bastards!” 

At some point after reading A Thousand Sons, I decided one day to look up Egyptian names - I don’t even remember why. Just for the hell of it, I flipped to the “K” section - and found Khentimenti, mystical god of the dead’s destiny.

Kenny immediately became Khenti, and I think that was about the time I first started actually thinking of background fluff and characterisation for my lil plastic/metal mandollies. XD And THEN I decided that my lil band of TSons were actually still loyalists, so I had to come up with a backstory for that, and reasons WHY they were blue instead of red, and why they’d still have a daemon prince and a Defiler (because I still wanted to use those models, damn it), so on and so forth. My fluff also tied in to the fluff of some of my mates, and we all developed our own lil collaborative area of 40k space where all our armies hang out and interact, etc. So that led to a story I wrote based on one of the games I’d had with some of them, and I’ve been developing the fluff for my army (alongside theirs) ever since. XD It also led to me starting a second TSons army - this one more 30k-styled, in the red and white instead of blue and gold.

One of the other things that’s kept me in the hobby is the various RP games that Fantasy Flight released - Deathwatch, Dark Heresy, Only War, & Black Crusade. My lil group of mates have been playing those various games for the past four or five years, even moreso than the tabletop miniatures game. Since all our games are set in the same general area, stuff that happens in one game can affect (or completely derail ¬_¬) what goes on in another. My various characters have lost enough body parts collectively to almost build an entire new person. XD Good times!

anyway uh wall-of-text crits for over nine thousaaaaaaand~ I hope you enjoyed this ramble! XD