A long, long time ago, when I was but a lad of 13 years, my family dragged me on a trip to visit distant relatives in Toronto, Canada. I was told minimal information about our itinerary or what the occasion even was, and the other people my age (cousins? Second cousins? Aunts and uncles? Who cares) were hopelessly boring people who enjoyed sitting in their home and talking about brands.
At one point, my family took me to some lame mall with second rate shoes, and that was honestly the highlight of the monotonous trip. I remember spending a few minutes on a bench examining the mall’s potted plants. Apparently the fellow who maintained and moved those plants around the mall was a contractor with a BS in psychology who warned me about studying subjects which don’t lead directly to career paths.
Anyway, as I was wandering around the mall, I happened upon a small shop full of other younguns with big, bright yellow letters over the door: Games Workshop. I had no idea what that company was, but I enjoyed games as much as any other young person, and so I entered to see a group of people gathered around a medieval diorama and engaging in what looked like gambling to my adolescent mind.
On that day, I watched a chaos dragon with a chaos lord riding it initiate a charge against Durthu the treeman, then get spanked so sorely that the freaking chaos dragon with a lord riding it broke, panicked, and fled as soon as the big ugly tree struck back. I was sold and persuaded my parents to buy me, as compensation for dragging me around their trip like an accessory, that giant 5th edition box with the Bretonnians and Lizardmen on the cover.
Upon returning home, I badly painted the models inside, not even using primer for most of them, while flipping through those two books which came with the box. I think they were the rulebook and battle book. Yeah, they had to be, because the battle book is what got me hooked on chaos dwarves.
I can still remember happening upon the page with the black cauldron surrounded by baddies wearing awesome hats. Magma in a bowl burned orange and the stone around them glowed red simply due to the heat, but like a horrific inversion of Tolkien’s dwarves, these guys obviously used their uncanny resistance to heat for nefarious purposes. I could already tell just by looking at them. Their hobgoblin and black orc sidekicks featured in that book were interesting additions as well, though the two ridden monsters were the final icing on the cake. Who could resist the appeal?
Anyway, my models (along with my comic books) were all sold for far less than their real value when I left for college, and adulthood hit me like an 18-wheeler truck. It was only two years ago, when a friend of mine from SWtOR recommended Total Warhammer to me, that I began running google image searches for pics of chaos dwarves while pretending to work. One of the images which came up were from the old version of the forums, and I haven’t looked back since. Only Snotling slaves look back; Dawi Zharr always look forward to the next object of domination.