The adventure begins...buying a furry horde of death-dealing rat men!

*Neek!* After searching the deepest (online) caverns and plundering the nearest (man-thing) towns for allies and troops to bring to my warbanner, my initial force is as follows... x1 Skaven Battalion Box. (new, via eBay) x2 boxes of Plague Monks. (new, via eBay) x1 box of Stormvermin. (new, via eBay) x1 Screaming Bell/ Plague Furnace box. (new, via eBay) x 50 (Approx) Skaven slaves/ Clanrats. (used, via eBay) x1 Warp Lightning cannon. (Games Workshop store) x1 Warlord/ Chieftain. (Games Workshop store) x2 Ratswarm blister packs. (Games Workshop store) x3 Jezzail units. (Games Workshop store) x1 Warpfire Thrower. (Games Workshop store) x1 Skaven Army Book (new, via eBay) x1 Warhammer Fantasy Battles Rulebook (new, at Games Workshop) Not bad, but no force for world domination! ...nevermind, every scheming evildoer with world domination in mind needs to start somewhere, and this initial force should allow me to play games of between 1,500 - 2,000 points. (I'm guessing anyway - I haven't led this force in anger yet, so making a full list isn't something that I have done!) Now, I should say that even as a grown man with an income of my own, I found purchasing this amount of models and packs expensive, and that was even after using eBay ended up with me paying approximately a third of RRP in the country that I live in. In future posts, I'll come back to my experiences on eBay and what I learned as an eBay noob, but suffice to say that for any would-be commander or convert to Warhammer, checking out eBay can be well worth the effort. Why did I choose the items above? (trust me, the Skaven have a ton more that it was difficult to resist in their ratty evilness...) The key thing to purchasing any Skaven army (or indeed any Warhammer Fantasy Battles force) is reading your Army Book carefully and getting a good sense of what units are essential to an army (your "Core" units) and how many you might need of them. For Skaven, it would be the following: -Clanrats -Skaven Slaves -Stormvermin -Nightrunners -Giant Rats -Rat swarms ...the key point being LOTS OF THEM! Skaven units are cheap (in terms of points) so outnumbering your opponent is (apparently) essential. So, getting hold of these guys seemed key. The Battalion set gives you x40 Clanrats/ Skaven slaves (the models can be used as either), while eBay usually has ALOT of older Skaven models from prior incarnations of the game that are dirt cheap and can be used as slaves or clanrats in friendly games. Got to slink off to bed now... *Mreep*