Everything comes to an end...

I'm sure everyone is familiar with that nasty feeling that real life is interfering with the hobby.
Well, now think of that feeling and amplify it thousandfold. Then you'll probably get to how I felt for the last month or so.
What's happening, you might wonder. The answer is in these pictures...

Yes, that is my war room. And how different it looks from when I first showed it in this blog.
And yes, I've left my house in Manchester and the UK altogether. Now I'm back in Palermo, my hometown in Sicily, waiting for an international shipment to reunite me with my beloved hobby stuff.

But rather than using this post to whine about the situation, I want to use it to say thanks to all the good friends I made in Manchester through the hobby.

Phil, Dave, Darius, Lee, Robert, David and Saul have all been amazing gaming pals. I remember way back in 2008 when I first stumbled onto Saul and Phil, playing a 40k game with two beautifully converted and painted armies at the Manchester Arndale store. The armies were already enough to call my attention, but what was even better, was their attitude. They were telling a story, not competing!

And many a story we all told over the years, always going the extra mile in building terrains, converting models and painting them. First it was through Mordheim, Necromunda and some crazy homebrewed rules for massive naval battles foughts on the floor. Then in 2015 came Age of Sigmar and the earliest incarnation of Kill Team, exactly when I was setting up my war room.

And that's when Saul and I embarked on the journey that made us best gaming mates. Over these last 8 years, Saul and I completely attuned to each other creatively. While everybody was chipping in and bouncing ideas off each other, the two of us went a step further. Saul regularly came up with new ideas for settings and story lines, I quickly found the most fitting rules and scenarios to bring them to the table and then, without even actually coordinating the writing of our narrative battle reports, we ended up writing the same story from two different but complementary points of view.

Looking back now to the adventures of Inquisitors Lenk and Quintus Severus down in Mancunius Dome, the messing about of the Rotmoons with Kalyustar's dreams of greatness in the Harrowmark's gloom, the clashes between the Purebred and Anomaly Protocol on the scorched wastes of Tor Megiddo, the Shadowflames' rivalry with the Cleavermaws fought across the Realms' Edges, the turf wars between the Void Phoenixes and the Bleaksouls in the shadows of Commorragh, the Ironforged's bullying of the Swordfyshes under the Prowling Forest boughs and the many more smaller campaigns we played, I can see how Saul and I shared the same love for ambiguos characters.
Neither heroes nor villains, they never really won or were actually defeated. They just ground through their lifes in the grim worlds they inhabited. And so all our campaigns always had a narratively bitter ending, with no character fully achieving what they wanted, just like in real life. But in real life we had had the best blast you could imagine!

So, thanks everybody for 15 amazing years of storytelling! And even more love to Saul, for being the greatest companion in the hobby I could have ever dreamed of. See you at Warhammer Fest, you filthy greenskinned pirate!