Across the UK, Sunday 23rd September heralded almost 8000 hobbyists across the country head to the National Exhibition Centre for before 10am. Many of them with carefully packed miniatures and amazingly painted display pieces or with hopes of gleaning some snippet of unknown information.
I was up around 6am and after doing some last minute changes (including failing to attach a display plinth) to my Golden Demon entry headed out the door at 7am to get my lift. My brother and I got to the NEC around 9.30am although stood in the cold for 25 minutes as the stewards insisted that there wasn’t an early entry queue for people with Golden Demon entries – there was and it opened at 9am…
First port of call (after having a pee and filling in our Golden Demon entry slip) was towards the Forge World stand where we were lucky enough to pick up the very last seminar ticket! We then dropped our Golden Demon entries off and decided to head to the sales area, which Games Workshop had this year (thankfully) utilised an entire hall (which in previous years hadn’t been open). On the positive, there was a queuing system. On the negative, it took us two whole hours to get round. I was lucky enough to pick up two of the limited edition t-shirts, four of the Games Day Anthologies, a copy of Lone Wolves and Horus Heresy Book One – Betrayal (which I have discovered was limited to 200 copies). I am a bit annoyed that whilst being ‘assisted’ by one of the staff when looking for a t-shirt, he handed me the wrong one which I didn’t discover until I’d got home…
The Forge World Seminar was fantastic, I’ve been in three before and Tony Cotrell is a fantastic speaker and didn’t disappoint this time. Alan Bligh was there too and both spoke about the planned projects. It never fails to amaze me how thick people are however. Warhammer Forge is currently working on “Black Fire Pass”, it was made very clear that this is the ONLY project being worked on for Warhammer – there must have been four or five questions asking if item xyz is going to be made or are they going to develop item abc for Warhammer. Which bit of “Black Fire Pass is Forge World’s only Warhammer Project” is difficult to understand. The Horus Heresy project was talked about a lot (as you can imagine) and I’ve created a post on what was spoken about. It’s really exciting and I actually think that more people are enthusiastic about this than anything else Games Workshop is working on.
Overall the day was very enjoyable, not getting a first cut sticker and queuing for 2 hours was the only two low points of the day (getting up early I’m not including).
Anyway onto the eye candy!