I love 2000Ad. I have been reading 2000ad for almost as long as I have been into wargaming. But I'd previously never been able to justify playing 2000ad wargames. Firstly because I have too many other large projects on the go all the time. And secondly because as much as I love Judge Dredd, my favourite 2000ad strips are unlikely to see wargaming figures at any time (don't judge me, I'd love a set of Space girls minis, or even a B.L.A.I.R.1 mini! haha!) The most important of these would be a full blown Sinister Dexter gunshark wargame! If we ever got a gunshark game, it would be enough to make me sell up most of my other projects and buy three of everything at once!
After kicking myself for not buying up the entire Mongoose line back in the day, when Warlord games got the license and re-released the 2000ad line I decide it was time. I already owned about everything I would ever want/need for Necromunda anyway (and it would all be useable for Dredd and other Post-Apoc gaming anyway). So I brought as many of their releases as I could during the run. But I was busy with a degree at the time and the games have all sat in storage ever since. Then the line got cancelled last year (yet again it seems) and many of the items I'd been waiting patiently for (Sabbat being the main one) were gone, never to be released.
But I realised I had a good amount of Judge figures anyway and I could plug the gaps in my collection with just a handful of other characters. After a bit of shopping around on trade sites from other Dredd collectors, a few terrible prices on ebay, some gaps filled via 2000ad board games, some shopping around from other manufacturers, and completing my warlord games collection during their last chance sale last year, I've now filled some gaps with Mongoose figures, and I've even started a small collection of citadel for some oddities and citizens. There are still some characters to go, but I'm not without some of the main ones for the campaigns I want to run initially.
Sadly, I did order a fairly sizeable order from one UK manufacturer that decided to not send me my package, then messed me about with a refund. I was able to get refunded eventually but they did everything they could to delay it. This was the first and only time I've really had a sour experience with any miniatures company and it does mean I'm now missing a fairly sizeable amount of enemies and generic 'characters' which I'd intended to use in place of some of the models warlord games never released.
As the final releases for the judgement day campaign was never released, and my order I mention above was for some zombies, my main mission right now for Dredd is to start off by getting the models/characters for The Cursed Earth story as a campaign. This is one of my favourite stories and has some of my favourite characters, some of which I've already been able to pick up in trades.
I now have a pretty sizeable and workable Dredd + friends wargaming collection.
Alongside Dredd, as we have no current model line or game updates to distract purchases, my other real goal is to work on my own version of a Sinister Dexter collection (with some crossover/future hindsight for work into Azimuth). I don't know what rules I'd want or use, but right now I'm all about getting together the models for the huge cast from the full 25+ years of the comics.
I have a handful of models collected for various characters from across the SinDex eras, as I get them completed I intend to catalogue them on a specific blog page which I'm currently putting together. I'm still missing quite a few, there are a few that have been really hard to source. And then some I'm having to source parts from a variety of places to make specific conversions. But I was quite surprised by how many I was able to gather together from just a couple of sources!
So whilst getting Dredd painted this year is high on the agenda, I plan to spend a lot of time in pouring back over Downlode.
This is Downlode, almost past your bedtime.
The city’s always been full of lead.
Usually it flies.
Tonight, it waits to be painted.
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