Trip down 3rd Ed memory lane

Doomboy says I'm living in the past.

Back when people mixed dishwashing liquid into their inks to get washes.

Well, here's the past :

And my first Deathwing termie:

Looks good. You have complete army?

Yup, quite complete for the White Scars.

But they're stored away in my hometown, and the paint job is waaaay too crude.

the you should come and play.. if they are complete... 1750 maybe.

A few more memories of WH40K 3rd Ed in the UK came back to me:


-Back in 2001 when I was studying in Preston the nearest GW stores were GW Preston, and a tiny one in Trafford Centre Mall, Manchester (1-2 tables)

-I arrived a few years after 3rd ed was released, when everything was perfectly balanced and bland after all the codices were reset by the big rulebook

-White Dwarf actually contained useful fluff and rules that didn't appear anywhere else.

-The 3rd ed box was SM vs DE, with some plastic coconut trees terrain for some reason; new plastic SM tank kits had just come out

-DE, Tau and Necrons were first introduced at around this time. Eldar Wraithlords were way overpowered- bring 3 in your list and you will automatically get labelled a Kraftworld player.


-People were minimising their Troops choices and spamming vehicles on the Internet, but players in the UK tend not to min/max much.

-A few independent retailers carried about a small shelf of WH40K kits (like one at the Lake District - Windermere). SM Tac squad, SM bike squad, IG.

-The 2 GW employees at my local store knew almost nothing about miniature wargaming outside of GW. When I asked about paints for a Battletech mini, the one I was talking to had no idea, and another referred to it as 'that anime themed game'.

-Rackham was still around at the time, although I've never seen any of their stuff in the UK

-The Uni I attended had a defunct club called the "Ribble Warriors", and no one I knew played GW stuff outside of the store

-There were no Citadel shades / washes back then, and the paint bottles were horrible. You had to twist them shut, and more often than not leave a gap due to dried paint and waste a bottle. There was a Citadel ink line though, and that was quite interesting to use.

Chesnut Ink is my favourite. Have been using the same bottle for years and it is still about 1/3rd of the bottle

I actually still have about 3 or 4 Chestnut ink. Great stuff.

Since we're on this 3rd ed memory lane thing, you have a real good point about WD then. There were lots more stories, new rules and hobby stuff, though the standard of hobbying and the models themselves are much higher nowadays.

But WD was inspiring nevertheless. I started 3 armies because of WD articles - Ravenwing, Raven Guard and IG Armored Company. The Raven Guard rules in WD was really chracterful - a key feature was that if you have scouts deployed on the ground, your deep strikes became 'on-time on-target' (re-roll scatter), there were penalties for taking vehicles, and jump packs were encouraged.

The time of 3rd ed was also when the Balau players used to go to Singapore tournaments regularly. That was a lot of fun.

Yeah, WD used to be the source of all army list info before there were codices. Space Wolves for Rogue Trader was introduced via WD back in 1989.

The first WD I bought even included two sheets of thick paper in the middle, with an entire Warhammer Fantasy inn you could cut out and build.

One of the later WD gave away a free space marine 2-piece plastic mini, when WH40K 2nd ed debuted.

It also listed bitz for sale, and had army deals for whatever is featured in the issue's battle report.

All I knew about mini painting came from the 'Eavy Metal that Mike McVey wrote back then. He loved red and painted skulls everywhere.




As for chestnut ink, I think we all used to wash flesh, wooden textures, and brown the static grass on our bases with it.

If I'm not mistaken, there were was a larger number of paints in the Citadel line back in the 1990s? In comparison to right before the paint line refresh this year.

I like the Chapter Approved section.
And then GW came up with compendium of all rules in WD.

Way back in 1993, when White Dwarf introduced WH40K 2nd ed in a boxed set:

HeroQuest boxed set, from Milton Bradley + GW in 1989:

This really bring back old memories...

The surprisingly THIN 3rd ed rulebook that came in the boxed set: