Musings of a Green Man

Nowadays we think of mortuary monuments as being limited to tombs, crypts, gravestones and occasionally commemorative statues, plaques or park benches. This is a fairly recent phenomenon, however. Many cultures have or have had mortuary practices that seem alien to the western mindset, whether collecting the heads of fallen foes to honour them, pickling the heads or other body parts of deceased kin so that they are always with their family, or collecting the severed hands of hanged criminals for magical protection, and that's just examples from Europe. One such practice, although rather less gruesome, arose in the 16th century and continued through into the 18th century: the mortuary sword. Mortuary swords sound a lot more funereal than they were. What they were, and many still are, isn't a sword to be buried with, rather they were weapons (usually swords, but other types do exist) featuring a depiction of a deceased notable, and/or inscriptions in their honour. The most famou...

Yesterday i rambled on and on about our nostalgia for old systems and miniatures, wistful memories of glory days when everything seemed so much better, when it actually wasn't. Today's topic is the homages to years gone by that are still shaping our hobby. Like those nods and winks to older pop culture that we see in films and television, games and miniatures are full of similar. The most obvious is the Chainsaws. These began as references to Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead , but s pawned miniatures with such, including Citadel's LE23, Chainsaw Wizard, and numerous models for Warhammer Fantasy and Blood Bowl armed with anachronistic chainsaws. It even spawned a game , Chainsaw Warrior. The homage's continuation should be fairly obvious, but for those who haven't had their coffee, there are numerous examples of chainsaws in modern sci-fi battle games, from the chainsword of 40k, to the chain bayonets on many of the guns ...