Member Spotlight: Liam Wise — The Quiet Backbone of the Wildlings

I met Liam at a table with a half-painted Cursed City model in front of him and a podcast still playing quietly from his phone, which is about as good an introduction to him as any. Some members are the loud, visible energy of a club night. Liam is the other kind, the one who's been there so long and so consistently that it's easy to forget the club used to run without him. Ask around and you'll find people he's taught to load an airbrush, people he's helped move house, people who only started playing Marvel Crisis Protocol because he wouldn't stop talking about it. I wanted to actually sit down and get his story properly, so I did.

From Middlesbrough to Space Hulk

He traces it all back to Middlesbrough, to being a kid who just kept popping into the Games Workshop there and staring at everything on the shelves until eventually he and his cousin wore their parents down. "Eventually me and my cousin convinced our parents to buy us a few things," he told me, and I could picture it exactly, because half the club has some version of that same story. His actual first box game was Space Hulk, second edition, around the time he was nine. It's one of those games that seems to come up constantly whenever anyone our age talks about how they got into this, and Liam's no exception.

The Man Behind Marvel Crisis Protocol

What surprised me a bit was how much has changed since then. These days he says he'll play almost anything, and he genuinely means it. Marvel Crisis Protocol gets a mention straight away, and Warhammer Underworlds, the old edition specifically, but it's dungeon crawlers that really seem to hold his attention. Right now that means a Cursed City campaign with a few of the lads from the club, models getting painted up as they go rather than in one big batch beforehand. It's worth saying plainly: Marvel Crisis Protocol being a regular fixture at the Wildlings is largely down to Liam. He got into it, brought it along, and now there's a table for it most weeks. That's how a lot of the club's game nights actually grow, one person's enthusiasm turning into everyone else's new favourite thing.

A Lockdown Habit That Stuck

He wasn't always this painting-focused though. "I used to be all about the game, especially 40k 8th edition," he said, "but during COVID I got very into painting up my stuff as a distraction for myself." It's a story I've heard from more than one member now, lockdown nudging people sideways into the hobby side almost as a coping mechanism, and then the hobby side just sticking. For Liam it clearly stuck hard, because he's become one of the people others go to specifically to learn airbrushing. It's a skill that puts a lot of hobbyists off entirely, all that kit and setup feels like a barrier, but having someone at the club who'll patiently talk you through it at your own table changes that completely.

Five Podcasts, One Backlog

His actual hobby sessions, he told me, run on podcasts almost constantly. He keeps about five on rotation, binges one until he's fully caught up, then moves onto the next, "by the time I'm back to the first there is a nice backlog waiting for me." It's a small detail but a very recognisable one, that rolling queue of hobby podcasts as background noise while the brush is moving.

Quick Jobs Count Too

When I asked what he was proudest of on the painting side, he didn't reach for one obvious answer. "I like most things I paint even if they're only quick and low effort," he said, before naming two pieces that clearly do mean something to him, his Dr Laura bust, which he called probably his best model, and his very first bust, Baba Yaga by Karol Rudyk. What struck me was the rest of what he said, that he generally knows how much effort he wants to put into any given model and is happy with the result either way. A lot of hobbyists measure themselves entirely against their single best piece. Liam seems to have made peace with the idea that a quick weekend paint job and a competition-worthy bust can both be worth doing, for different reasons, and both count.

The achievement he wanted people to know about was smaller sounding but genuinely impressive once you think about it: he has fully painted almost every boxed game he plays, and if something isn't finished it's nearly there. "It's rare I'll bring an unpainted model to the table," he said. Anyone who's ever had a box of grey plastic sitting untouched for a year knows how hard that actually is to maintain.

Why He's Really Here

Then we got onto why he's here at all, and this is where the conversation really slowed down. Liam moved up in November 2021 to be closer to his daughter, and he didn't know a single person when he arrived. "I didn't know anyone and simply came to the club to make friends," he said. "I was honest and open about it from the start and everyone was friendly and welcoming." He talked about people at the club always being there to offer a hand, well outside the hobby too, and said plainly that it's the people who keep him coming back rather than the games themselves. "Gaming and rolling dice is fun, but seeing my friends and having a natter is why I always try and make it when I can."

The Moving Van Moment

I asked if there was a particular moment that stuck with him, expecting a big in-game story, and instead got something better. "I like the non-hobby stuff," he said, "friendly chats, bowling, mental health coffee mornings, even things like doing the community centre garden." Then he mentioned, almost as an aside, that he'd only been to the club a handful of times when Daryl turned up at his house to help him shift furniture because he was getting a room plastered. Nobody asked Daryl to do that. It just happened, because that's apparently just what people do here. If you wanted one story that captures the whole point of this club, that's a strong contender.

Colour Over Plastic

His advice to anyone on the fence was blunt in the best way: "Any colour on a model looks better than plastic." He pushed the point further too, telling people chasing a game to try lots of smaller systems rather than committing straight to one big one, since you can fit three quick games into the time one big game takes. And on what the hobby's taught him more broadly, he landed on something that sounded almost like a small piece of life advice rather than a hobby tip: it's fine not to always put in max effort, fine to be disappointed sometimes, fine to lose interest for a while. Things go well or they don't, there'll always be more models and more games, and another day always comes.

The One He'd Never Sell

We finished on the one model he'd keep if he lost everything else, a limited edition silver plated Emperor's Champion from Games Workshop's 25th anniversary, one of only 250 ever made. He won it in a store raffle as a kid and was actually disappointed at the time, because someone else in the same raffle won a huge pile of painted miniatures instead. Looking back now, he's genuinely glad to have it sitting on his shelf. It felt like a fitting way to end, honestly, because that's Liam all over: something that didn't look like much at the time turning out, with a bit of patience, to be exactly the thing worth keeping.

You can find him online as Laam999, mostly on Reddit these days, though not as often as he used to be.