It would have been about a year and a half ago now, October of 2017, that I started collecting scifi models. One of the guys from my D&D group wanted to get into 40k, and was looking fora co-enabler. I told him I wasn't interested. I thought I was pretty familiar with the 40k aesthetic, and what I knew of it it didn't really interest me.

No one else in the friend group was either. Mulling over the idea for day or two though, I thought back to various scifi minis lusted over in the process of buying D&D minis. Mostly just about one:

Just look at this guy. He looks like he took should be stealing water from the Lars homestead. The picture originally listed was much blurrier, and the vendor didn't list the name or manufacturer of the mini. I'd had my eye on this mystery man for months without a plausible excuse to buy him. Until now.

I warned my aspiring Space Wolf friend that I wasn't really very interested in proper 40k stuff, but that I'd put together a ragtag army of mercenaries to fight him. I knew enough about the setting to know that the necromunda models were rad, so I told him that what few first-party GW models I would pick would be in that line.

I loaded up a couple ebay carts full of odd models I've been eying, including the above, and while waiting for my orders to come in I did a crash course in the lore, crawling through wikis, watching youtube summaries, and wading more into the current GW webstore and ebay.

It didn't take me long to learn about Rogue Traders and to put that name to everything that appealed to me about the setting, but back then there were problems with making an army around them. For one, there were no Rogue Traders in the 40k rules at that time. The second setback was more painful, the ebay order that included the above mini arrived without him It had been short-shipped by the vendor who said he couldn't find it in his storage. He sent along a refund and a nice apology, which I accepted.

Still I was crushed. I didn't know even vaguely what the name or manufacturer of the model might be, and the incredibly blurry ebay reference photo (not the one above) wasn't reverse-image-searchable. Though I had a handful of other thematically similar models, I gave up on making a rogue trader army. The main inspiration had been lost, and what I had would be meaningless in terms of using the Imperial Guard rules.

I had gotten some nice dark angel bits in an ebay lot, and while their fluff was pretty boring to me, I start putting together a small force of Fallen with various renegade allies. Time passed. Suddenly, Kill Team is out. GW decides to start releasing rogue trader themed products, and all the while I had been slowly collecting older citadel models, paired with a more elaborate set of modelling goals. Armed with a greater understanding of the hobby, I tracked down the original model that brought me into this hobby. This blog is going to document the creation of his fellow crew, hopefully encouraging me to get some more painting done. 

I'm very lazy and would prefer to batch paint, but the style of minis I'm looking for need to be painted individually, so I'm hoping that writing a blurb up about each model will incentivize me start giving each crew member an evening of their own. I'll revisit this guy at some point to give him some fluff, but this post is already way too long.