A Dark Deranged Structure: Warhammer Townscape

Weeks without posting and two updates in one day! First off, apologies to anyone who asked a question, made a comment or was in conversation with me before my sudden disappearance. With my sudden change in circumstance I have more time to chip away on the lead mountain and build up my painted miniature collection. As you may be aware, I have been slowly painting up warbands for the four ruinous power to play a Realm of Chaos campaign but I also collect 80s citadel/GW products. In a previous life I was an archaeologist and I in many ways collecting old lead, stripping off the ancient paint and repairing and repainting the miniatures is a similar discipline. Perhaps that is why I enjoy collecting bits and pieces of old GW 80s box sets and eventually completing them once again.

One such completion was Warhammer Townscape. Back in the 80s I was bought this set for a birthday or Christmas and absolutely loved it, though I was too young to successfully build some of the buildings. I remember building my friends copies too- particularly the watchtower and stone tower which became focus points for our battles. I must have built about half of them before abandoning GW for beer, boobs and GCSEs. About 12 years ago I found the remaining card sheets and had a wonderful period of unemployment filled building the remaining models.Sadly, I stored these buildings in my father's rancid house and they went mouldy.

Over the last couple of years I have bought copy after copy on eBay in an attempt to complete the publication and I am glad to say that I have finally done so. It is pictured above. Every sheet is mint. I also have build quite a few duplicate sheets and having seen other bloggers still using these classic card buildings I decided to have a go at building a few as miniatures are difficult to paint properly at the moment. The memories came flooding back. I could remember many of the buildings, the little mistakes I made over twenty years ago and had a very pleasureable evening or so putting together several of the kits.

The package got me thinking. Yes they are made of card but for about £10 in 1988 you got 39 buildings. Each building was very different and had a certain charm. You could construct a sizeable village, town or even city. Wow! Today, even with all the skull infested plastic you'd be challenged to construct a hamlet! Anyway, thanks to Gaj over at Warhammer for Adults I have a PDF of the original designs, so if your interested, contact me and you too can build yourself a townscape for your games.