Converting Tyranids for use in Age of Sigmar is closer to the spirit of Oldhammer than fetishising old lead

These days one of the main reasons I have facebook is to keep in touch with Oldhammer people. Personally I prefer the forum and, of course, seeing other people's blogs - but especially in these days of lockdown there's a comfort in seeing all the cool things people have painted pop up on my screen. My ambivalence about facebook partly stems from the frustrating time I had as a moderator for the Oldhammer community, and the rather poor job I did there (mea culpa), but also from the fact that in a group of 12,500 members, with varying levels of engagement and interest, it's pretty much impossible to keep a sense of oldhammer as a creative project rather than just being "old minis".

One consequence of this is the frequent ritual of someone posting "What is Oldhammer?", a debate which rolls back and forth along predictable lines before getting locked or deleted. However, this weekend there was a rather interesting twist on the theme - a post that triggered a "What is Oldhammer?" proxy war without even posing the question.

The backstory seems straightforward enough - someone on a different facebook group bought a lot of early 90s Tyranids and is pondering how they might convert them for use in AoS. News of this was posted on the Oldhammer Community group, possibly with the mischievous idea that it would get some interesting reactions! And so it proved.

The vast majority of reactions (generally in the form of memes or "heresy detected" jokes) seemed aghast that anybody would do such a thing. Where reasons were stated these included:
a) AoS is smelly;
b) miniatures should be kept in their virgin state;
c) miniatures belong to certain games and should be used for those games rather than in games for which the minis are unsuitable.
One respondent went so far as to say that metal conversions are "junk" - an opinion that would consign many Golden Demon winners and numerous pages of 'Eavy Metal to the bin.

Now, hobby gatekeeping is generally a twattish thing to do (and my ill-fated stint as moderator proved that I was an inept gatekeeper), but I can't help but feel these kinds of "that belongs in a museum!" type responses miss the point altogether.

So I thought I'd just spell out my opinion: converting tyranids for use in AoS is Oldhammer as fuck.

Oldhammer is about creativity, it's not about slavishly adhering to someone else's intellectual property. I don't know much about the world of Age of Sigmar, but if someone wants to make it their own by adding in giant bugs, then good on them!

Oldhammer is not about the purity of one particular edition of a game, nor is it about restricting yourself to miniatures from a particular era (even if it is shaped by a particular aesthetic sensibility). It's about bringing new life to old forms, whether that be playing old editions with new miniatures, playing new games with old miniatures, or anything in between.

Oldhammer is not about venerating old miniatures as some kind of 80s/early 90s relics. It's about bringing them to life, playing games and finding new stories to tell. If that means converting old lead to create something new, then I salute you.

What was that I said about gatekeeping being twattish? Ah well. Oldhammer is creativity and storytelling or it is nothing. Something like that anyway...


But wait, there's more!

Funnily enough the concept itself sent me down a corridor of nostalgia. When I was a teenager, I was pretty fanatical about coming up with new rules and concepts. And one of the ideas I was developing around the time I first dropped out of the hobby was - you guessed it - a Tyranid army list for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. A genestealer cult in the court of an Elector Count, perhaps? Spores of death falling from the skies? Ripper swarms in the sewers?

My friends shot the idea down immediately: it didn't fit with canon, I was told. And anyway, there was no way that the Warhammer World would survive such an infestation. Hormogaunts could overwhelm the planet within weeks, rapidly reproducing until there was nothing else left. Maybe they were right, but even then I kind of resented the idea that the only stories worth telling were the ones that Games Workshop had already told. Partly it was just that the absence of an insectoid race in Warhammer Fantasy seemed like a gap worth filling, but also it was the sheer apocalyptic horror of the whole thing... And such apocalyptic visions and prophecies saturate the consciousness of the medieval and renaissance societies that Warhammer plays around with.

And as Thantsants pointed out, how else would you explain what's going on in Hieronymous Bosch (take, for example, The Temptation of St Anthony)?

Look up there - death from the skies...