Hello and thank you for looking at this little blog. It will be about my Forgotten, a Heresy-era Dark Angels force that has taken a bit of a journey to become what it now is- a Chaos Marine force in a local Nachmund Gauntlet Crusade campaign. This first entry is most likely to be the most boring, with no pics or lore or gameplay, just a winding story of how the force came to be. So, if you aren't interested in the self-indulgent personal history digression of a middle-aged hobbyist, feel free to pass on and wait until I get up some more entertaining content (no judgement). 

I'm currently forty years old, and started up 40k/wargaming in my early teens. Like many other players, my first models were Space Marines and for years I had an ever-growing collection of them. I was also young and dumb, so wound up becoming fairly obsessive in my hobby and began to buy up every "army of the month", sinking a lot of money into various boxes (whatever the equivalent to Combat Patrols were back in 3rd/4th ed) that got built but never painted. In fact, I don't think I ever had a full painted army in the first eight or so years in which I started the hobby. Anyway, I married my wife in my early twenties (around the beginning/middle of 4th ed I think) and realized that the hobby was too much of addictive obsession that was getting out of control; I decided to quit and got rid of almost all of my 40k stuff. Roughly $5k worth of stuff (probably something like triple/quadruple the value now) of models, books, and equipment were summarily thrown out or put into a box and forgotten about. 

Fast forward ten-ish years (roughly 2016-2017). I had stayed somewhat in the hobby space, reading the occasional BL novel and playing some of the various video games, but considered myself more of a PC/console gamer than wargamer anymore (was heavily involved in EVE Online and MWO). I was getting burnt out with PC gaming though, had recently stopped playing both of my big games and was looking for another diversion. I work night shift, so have quite a lot of time to research/read/do my own thing when work calms down and nothing happens- a coworker noticed me reading a BL novel and asked if I played. Chatting with him, I felt the urge to get back into the hobby. Rummaging around in my basement, I found a box that contained quite a bit of old SM stuff that had survived my purge and so I dug out some models. The HH rulebooks had just dropped, so I read through them and decided to create a force of Dark Angels, which were the Legion that I had liked for a long time. 

So I created my Dark Angels force, from the remnants of an old army and a lot of random eBay bit lots purchases/3rd party. I wasn't yet playing again, but the impetuous was there and I had begun to paint. After a year or so I had something like a 5k points worth army of painted DA, quite a bit of it magnetized, that was looking ok and I felt the need to start playing again. Then 8th ed 40k came out and I had another work buddy ask me if I wanted to play, so I left the HH sphere and made the Forgotten: a time-warped force of Heresy-era DA that were deployed to reinforce the Unforgiven in their fight against Chaos. My Dark Angels weren't really up to snuff in 8th ed, being worse than Primaris marines and not having quite the firepower needed to compete. So, they were regretfully put to the side as I began some different armies- Knights, Necrons, eventually a Primaris SM army. I had always loved my Forgotten, but they just weren't really something that worked on the battlefield for me, so they became more of a display army that I was proud of completing even if I didn't play them anymore. My hobby/gaming journey continued, as I attended some more competitive tournaments as a player and began to TO for a local store in small, 16-man tournaments myself. The tournaments I ran/run tend to be pretty casual, as the local scene isn't really competitive and I'm more interested in having the hobby grow/everyone have an enjoyable experience. There are plenty of more competitive tournaments/organizations close to us, but our local area is just not a strong one for competition.

About two months ago I was at the end of a local store's grow league- playing my Imperial Agents/Inquisition themed army that got totally destroyed continually (but was fun because it is a great way to introduce new players to the game). Another player came up to me and asked if I wanted to join a crusade campaign he was going to start up. I'm always down for some more gaming, so I said yes even though the last time I had looked at crusade rules was maybe early 9th edition. So, I pick up the Nachmund Gauntlet book and got to learning what Crusade was and how it played out- turns out Nachmund had sort of Grand Alliances that piled together to fight for specific areas, rather than each individual army fighting for just itself. Then I got a message from the Arbitrator (necromunda term, but appropriate), who asked me if I had a Chaos army to play with. He wanted at least one experienced player to be each alliance's Warmaster and I was one of the most experienced players in the campaign. He was repping the Xenos faction and another experienced crusade player had Imperials, so wondered if I could handle Chaos. Now, I have a few armies, but not one that was really considered Chaos.... but I did have the Forgotten. So I said sure, I'll do Chaos and here we are.

The Forgotten have now become Fallen, bitter veterans of a thousands-year long campaign against an Imperium that forgot their sacrifices and turned them into the enemy of convenience.  They are uncorrupted by the Chaos powers, sustained by their hate and resentment.