Confessions of an English Undead Fancier

Regular HoP readers will doubtless know that one or two of our authors have one or two... proclivities, in particular directions. I'm naming no names and pointing no fingers, I'm just going to make a few remarks about aliens, tentacles and Megan Fox, and let them speak for themselves.

It's easy to laugh at people's enthusiasms, especially when they're expressed as, ahm, hyperbolically as those of my learned colleague who shall continue to remain anonymous, but people who live in glass houses can't really throw stones. Since I happen to live in a particularly macabre glass house myself, I tend to keep my stones where nature intended, and spend my time cautiously avoiding letting on how far gone I am in my own little obsessions.

They tell me it's good to talk and that expressing oneself is healing though, so here it goes. I'm a pervy undead fancier.

I don't quite know where it started, or when, or why. I think I've always been a morbid little sod, for as long as I can remember, and no convenient Freudian excuses like "I had a near-death experience when I was ten" or "I just really liked Reaper Man" or even "I've been overexposed to Games Workshop's design aesthetics and now nothing is aesthetically complete for me without skulls all over it", although all these things are in fact true. It definitely predates the dubious fashion choices I made in my teens (and early twenties) (and yesterday), although I think it might have informed them a bit...

Me, aged seventeen, and a dead French author.
It's not even the right Dumas, but this one's grave was cooler.

However it started, though, one thing is crystal clear. I am absolutely raving mad for the undead. Can't get enough of 'em. We'll ignore the part where I dressed like a Hammer vampire and could say things like 'the cold yearning passion of oblivion' with a straight face, and cut to some stuff that's actually defensible. A decent-sized chunk of my Master's degree was earned from discoursing about the origins and definitions of 'necromancy' and my occasionally-mentioned PhD proposal is all about how authors use the undead as a vehicle for thought experiments about life and death and the boundaries between 'em. If I could steal one holiday from any culture in the world and bolt it on to British-ness, it'd be Dia de las Muertos without a doubt, and not just 'cause I have a thing for artful zombie makeup on a lady (although I do).

Unfortunately, the only photo I have of Hark all skulled up is blurry as hell.
Too sexy for reliable imagery, obviously. Unless it's the Masquerade.

It's also been a pretty definitive influence on my gaming career. Although, as is known full well to readers of these pages, I came in with second edition 40K's Orks and Space Marines, it didn't take long for me to drift into Warhammer Fantasy Battles, aided and abetted by this fine document here.

Explicitly concerned with relaunching the Undead range in the wake of Circle of Blood (itself an excellent campaign pack which I really must browbeat Shiny into playing through with me at some point, now that he has Bretonnians) and establishing the beginnings of the Tomb Kings/Vampire Counts divorce settlement, this was a volume chock-full of battles and background and painting guides for the mobile deceased, and it set me on the course that I've followed ever since. For years after that, I gravitated automatically to undead armies in any game that had them; I was an early adopter of the Necrons when they appeared six months later, and when the first Vampire Counts book came out, it proved to be the only thing in the history of ever that I've been sufficiently excited about to pre-order.

When I got into roleplaying, it was as a player in someone else's Vampire game; when I first ran a game, it took the player characters deep into Sylvania, hot on the trail of the vampire who'd 'kidnapped' the party Noble's sister. Naturally, I took to Vampire as the maggot to the carcass - burrowing inside it and digesting everything I chewed my way through, and I still haven't stripped all the tasty meat from that game's nourishing bones. I played and replayed the Undead campaigns in Warcraft III, and when I got into WoW, of course my first and still longest-serving character was Undead. By the time I was introduced to Warmachine, it was much much much too late for me; for all that I liked the High Reclaimer and what he was about, a few pages further in Warmachine: Prime introduced me to Cryx, and to this guy:

"They have a lich that runs on steam.
I don't care if they're any good or not.
I am playing these guys."

And in all this time, I've regretted not a moment of it, you hear me? Not a moment. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the periodic bouts of 'what-army-shall-I-play?' gamer angst with which I've been befouling the e-Nets for a little over three years were brought on entirely because I broke the cardinal rule and didn't just stick by my deadies, for good or ill, flavour of the month or favour of the designers be damned.

What about you? What's your fixation, your obsession, your fetish? What pulls you into its orbit no matter how hard you try to escape?