To begin I will share my story:
For me, it all started when I was in about 6th grade and had been playing D&D at the time with 2nd edition books I had looted from my Dad's box of college books. In library books, I had seen pictures of giant tables in books crawling with tanks and WWII type army men. I knew that there were wargames out there but I had no idea where or how to even begin to get into them. I didn't realize there was even a company called GW. Sure, I had also tried my hand at painting a few boxes of dungeons and dragons miniatures, but they were poorly cast and very tiny. I was terrible at painting. I had also tried to invent my own game using the transformers and micro machines that I had, giving each tank its own rules and etc. Of course, it never got off the ground, but the overall general notion of wargames intrigued me!
Then one balmy afternoon, several years later, me and one of my best buddies, Juice, headed out on the town to seek out a hobby shop I had found in the yellow pages (I had just turned 16 and this was well before Al Gore invented the internet - yes I'm that old). We went in to scope out the D&D selection, but were immediately drawn to the cool boxed set up on a wall covered with elf and goblin art. When we inquired about it, the shopkeeper told us what warhammer was and that both people took an army and faced off like in chess.
Which leads me to ask how did you come into playing Warhammer:
Now days there are plenty of entry vectors into the hobby. The Dawn of War series on the computer. The Horus Heresy books. The internet and blogs to stare at pretty pictures and research the game. Don't have a local hobby store? No problem - you can order and ebay everything you need. Obviously this leads to more exposure, but I still have to think the real charm comes in seeing two armies arrayed against on another on the table top. Surely that has to be the item that draws most folks in?
So now I pose the question - What got you into 40k? I would love to hear your story and I challenge other blogs out there and authors to post what got them into the hobby! Was it an individual or a moment where you stumbled across the hobby?