A Tale of Ratspike: A few original John Blanche painted miniatures.

One of the great things about working in the wargames industry in Nottingham is that occasionally you get to see some really cool and rare stuff. In this case, today's was a collection of miniatures painted by the late and dearly missed John Blanche, some of which were actually featured in the Ratspike book. I was asked to bring in my copy so we could work out which ones were in there! 

 More photos after the cut! 

GW's Weirdest Ever Release - Calamity!

 Here's an interesting one for you, what I consider to be Games Workshop's absolute weirdest release ever, a board game called Calamity! (with the exclamation mark!) 

Not only was it a game based in the world of insurance, it was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and also contained multiple suicidal insurance brokers on the front!

More info after the cut....

GW Artifacts, (An occasional series): Some unpublished artwork.

So, this is something I'm pretty certain no one has seen for thirty years. I recently found them whilst going through some old paperwork and thought you guys might be interested in seeing them.

When I started at GW I was in Mail Order up on Chewton Street in Eastwood, and at some point in my tenure it was decided that all of the Mail Order Trolls would get individual packing slips. As part of that, we were all shipped off to the studio to be drawn by one of the studio artists, and these are the results:

Top Row L-R:  Dan, Jon, ?. Bottom Row: ?, Mike?, Conrad, Dave?

I'm guessing by the style that they were drawn by Carl Critchlow, but it was that long ago I'm afraid my memory is rather fuzzy in that regard. Also, rather more unfortunately, my caricature was done later, and I can't for the life of me find the paperwork with mine on, so it may have been consigned to the dustbin of history long ago. These were my Mail order compatriots at the time, but also due to my imperfect memory I can no longer remember half of the names.

more info after the cut...