Spearheading a community

community building

Entry posted by someone2040 May 13, 2017

1,097 views

Hi all,

So a little introduction to myself. I've been playing Warhammer since the late 90's. I've collected a variety of Fantasy armies over the years, Lizardmen, brief stint with Ogre Kingdoms, brief stint with Empire, Dogs of War, Beastmen, kind've Orcs and Goblins, High Elves and now in Age of Sigmar, Slaves to Darkness and Free Peoples. Up until Age of Sigmar though, I was predominantly just a casual player who played mostly with friends earlier on (High school), and later in my local Games Workshop, but did attend tournaments.

I'm from a place of the world called South Australia. Australia is a large place, with most of our major cities along the east coast and then a few others scattered around. This unfortunately means, that most of the activity happens along the east coast. I remember the biggest tournament I've been to was a whopping 28 player shindig back in 2009! We certainly haven't seen a Fantasy tournament get that big since.

Anyway, with the advent of Age of Sigmar, it was an interesting time in our little community. Doom and Darkness at the time was running most of the events, and building a bit of a community near the end of 8th. When Age of Sigmar landed, it was of course, like everywhere met with mixed reception. We lost some regular players, and for a while it looked like, it wasn't going to take off.

I was a bit mixed, because I really enjoyed the fact that I could build little armies and enjoy the game. At the time, I had build High Elves up to 1200~ish points for a tournament, and was pretty satisfied with that. I like building to around that level, and then my interest starts to wane a bit and I need to do something else.

I'd always liked the Chaos Undivided look, where you had an army of black armoured Chaos Warriors marching into battle. I'd had Be'Lakor and Crom the Conquerer for a while since I liked those models, and it was the perfect opportunity to build an army based around Be'Lakor. But I was a bit afraid, what happened if this thing didn't take off? Everything was a bit lost.

However, in the end, I bit the bullet. I decided I wanted to make this army, and the local club was looking for people interested in running events and leagues towards the end of the year (To be started in the new year). So I took the bull by the horns, I wasn't sure if there'd be enough interest for a tournament, but I was interested in building my army up from almost nothing, so an Escalation League fit the bill perfectly. At the time, Clash Comp was getting a good rap, and it was an easy and lightweight way to build your army.

So in the end, I put it out there, made some Blogposts on my old blog, to chronicle what happened., and luckily enough it turned out that other people were also interested in playing with their old miniatures or making new armies. Over the past year and a bit, we've gathered a strong core group of players, and I've even run our first Age of Sigmar tournament back in March which managed to gather 13 players + myself. We've got another tournament coming up in July, which I'm again running and hoping we can hit 20 players.

So yeah, sometimes all it takes to get a community going is for someone to stick their hand up and run it. It's a lot of effort (Coming up with a loose narrative, battleplans and interesting rules each month was a bit of work), but in the end, if you want something to happen, you need to put the work in.

With that, I'll leave you with a picture of my army from about a year back, it's gotten larger since of course, but I can't find any good pictures of my force at the moment Hopefully a more complete picture to follow in a blog post later on.