[This post was originally posted to Otherverse Games & Hobbies as part of a series called Plastic to Painted, or P2P. You may see logos or references to this site and series]
All I Ever Wanted In High School Was A Land Raider…
Now I have 12 or some shit like that. Let’s see two for Dark Angels, two for Custodes, and two for Grey Knights. Then I have one each for Ultramarines, Iron Hands, Salamanders, Word Bearers, Iron Warriors and Black Legion. Yeah, I guessed it right. Twelve. But, I am certain I will end up with More. Quite the collection of Land Raiders
My love affair with the beefy, tracked, gun bedecked and terminator transporting leviathan of a tank started just after my obsession with Warhammer 40k began. I got the Angels of Death Codex all because of the pictures found in Space Hulk Second Edition. Within, I found pictures of the Deathwing Terminators that I craved, like a fiend. But wait! There, next to them were large bone colored behemoths. I was enthralled.
I bought boxes of mono-pose minis. I bought metal Deathwing terminators and a dreadnought. I gnashed my teeth over metal bits that had to magically be attached to plastic rhino bodies to make predators and whirlwinds.
But I never got that fuckin tank…
But then I did. Fourth edition of 40k had been in the wilds for years, or maybe it was the beginning of fifth edition. Either way it was before the Dark Vengeance box. I was out of college and I had a job that mostly paid the rent and fed us while also sending me to concerts in Boston to enjoy free booze and listen to live bands. I decided that I wanted to get back into 40k after being out of it for a few years.
It took some doing, but i was able to locate a FLGS a few towns over. I booted up Mapquest and made the dangerous journey across county lines and found the most precious of treasures. Having seen the chapter doors on the Forge World website, I ordered them along with the Deathwing Venerable Dreadnought: My first Forgeworld purchase.
I then forgot about the Land Raider. For years.
It wasn’t until well after I had purchased the Dark Vengeance box that I actually got around to building the Land Raider, along with the contents of that, most wonderful of starter sets. Kera and I played a few times, but never enough for me to paint anything. I bought a few more kits after 7th edition came out with that snazzy 3-book set.
But the land raider still sat unpainted along with the Dark Talon I had built and primed.
Around this time I found myself stressed. Kera was getting sicker, and we were staying home more and more. I don’t remember what I was digging through the walk-in storage closet for, but I came across the horde of Warhammer miniatures. A cache that I had moved several times, across state lines, and periodically added to. I shit you not, it was like a bright light descended and angels sang.
I got some new tools, cleared some space on my computer desk and got to work. It had been the better part of a decade since I had painted a model. Sure, I had stayed more or less up to date with the game, and had collected some more models, but I decided it was time to leap back into a hobby I had only enjoyed from the periphery for years.
I painted a rhino or two, the aforementioned Dark Talon and this Land Raider, complete with fancy doors. I started doing some research as to what I needed to get back into the Hobby. Soon after, Games Workshop announced the imminent arrival of 8th Edition.
I then went a little nuts with 40k.
I tore into the Dark Imperium box like a man possessed (by which I mean I most delicately cut the securing tape and removed the slip cover with little to no damage before proceeding careful to extract the contents like a surgeon) and painted the contents as Dark Angels.
The local gaming store was having a moving sale, and I got the Talons of the Emperor box on-the-cheap. All of a sudden I had some golden armored badasses. So I got another box. With two Land Raiders I decided that I needed to pimp out my second ride, so as not to look monotonous. I used the entry doors from a plastic terrain kit to add an eagle motif to the front of the second golden tank.
Then I got Guilliman and the rest is history.


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Tyson
Obsessive and neurotic collector of little plastic men, novels about the same little plastic men and paints to make the little plastic men pretty. Married to Kera, who puts up with him and pretends that she doesn’t hear him speaking to the little plastic men in between making pew pew noises in the hobby room. Requires adult supervision. A menace to himself but rarely to others. More beard than man