april 2018 – Daan of War

2018 So far

Finally, we’re catching up here on the new blog!

In this post I’ll spend some time discussing the stuff I’ve been up to in 2018. It’s actually been quite a busy year so far. In fact, it’s been so busy I’m attempting to take things a little easier this summer and not be swamped with events and painting deadlines every week or so.

Speaking of events: my 2018 started off in preparation for the Horus Heresy Bloodstorm tournament. This event was convieniently held at my local game store and with only 2 unpainted Raven Guard models left, I tried to bring both of them to the tournament. In the end I was only succesful in finishing my Land Raider Proteus in time (pictured below). Corax took longer than I expected and I wanted to do the primarch of my legion justice and decided against rushing him for the sake of an event.

The bloodstorm events, by the way, are worth mentioning in this blog for the amazing tables and scenery alone. Every table was provided with a gaming mat from gamemat.eu and tournament scenery from Wargames Tournaments painted by Peter from Scar’s Miniature Madness. Everything looked amazing and to me, that almost automatically makes for some awesome games. As for the actual games: I played three that day.

First one against Night Lords was a great game against a cool dude. I had a lot of trouble in that game due to bad dice rolling (failing a lot of reserve rolls and night fighting rolls) as well as my inexperience with Night Lords as a legion.

Second game was against a cool looking mechanicum force, but the fact that it had a Porphyrion made it an incredible struggle for me to fight against. The only defense I had against super heavies were my 5 man melta squads in drop pods, but my opponent had castled his Knight up to such a degree that there was simply no way to get close enough. In the end I whiffed the only melta salvo that I was able to get off and was forced to watch the rest of my army get relentlessly bombarded with templates until it was gone. At least this was a short game.

The third game was against mechanicum (Again!), but this time the player had a much nicer list and I had seen the guy before at the Armies on Parade competition. This was probably the most fun as I actually had somewhat of a chance at winning for a while. In the final turns I was in a pretty good position to grab some vital objectives. However, as fate would have it, I whiffed some crucial run and save rolls, leaving me on the short end of a close victory point tally.

The next few weeks were spent painting Corax and thereby finally finishing the last of my Raven Guard models. I am super proud on how he turned out and can honestly say that it’s the best model I’ve ever painted. Also, with Corax done, I felt like a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders as I did not have a single unfinished Raven Guard model on my shelf since at least 2 years. On to new projects!

The next few months saw me playing some more AoS with my fledgling Skaven force as more people in the store got interested in the game and I let myself get caught up in the Malign Portents hype by building and painting a Darkoath Warqueen:

I really love this model and it was a lot of fun to not paint a space marine for once. She did very well on her first outing as well. Putting down an opposing Skaven Warlord right before staring down a Stormfiend and keeping it occupied for a good while.

The next thing on the agenda was the “Impact” miniature wargaming event which was also held in my home city.

Above you can see our display stand as it we set it up for the convention and below is a piece of background that I wrote the night before, along with some detail shots of the table itself. I’m really happy that I was able to rely on Peter being there with his Iron Warriors as well as Joyce and Dirk for being able to lend their armies to the cause. Compared to the Scale Model Challenge there were a bunch of people who couldn’t make it this time, but I’m glad we were still able to put on a good showing.

Impact itself was a really cool convention and although it was relatively small compared to the SMC, it seems to be growing each year and where the SMC was more of a miniature painting convention, this one was more focussed on the gaming aspect. For next year it’s likely we won’t be taking a display to Impact and try to arrange a more interactive presence instead.

After Impact I kept busy preparing for 2 other insanely cool events. Both planned together in the same weekend; I was fully aware that it was going to be incredibly exhausting, but probably worth it.

The first event was a second Bloodstorm tournament. 40k this time and I took a revamped Chaos list as a last ditch attempt to get the army working.

1st game was against Blood Angels. A fun game against a fairly balanced BA list. I made a bunch of mistakes that cost me a lot, but that’s down to my inexperience with the game. I felt like I could’ve won if I did some other things differently. The Knight pulled off some amazing stunts that game.

The second game was against another Chaos army that looked very nice and different at the start, but turned out to be a bit gamey in the end. His list was set up to (ab)use as much of the shooting of his Rubric Marines and Obliterators as possible, which resulted in some unfluffy choices IMO, but fair ‘nuff. At least when the good old 40k tournament mentality reared it’s ugly head that day it could’ve been a lot worse.

The final game was against the Imperial Fists of Rob (who I see regularly at the GameForce). Despite seeing eachother almost every friday we’ve never played a game of 40k. This was the most fun game of the day and also the closest. Rob’s army is by nature a bit of a gunline, but I had fun butting my head against it and despite Rob focussing all his shooting on my Knight in the first turn, the rest of my army made good progress and thanks to some lucky maelstrom objective cards and my army’s good maneuverability Rob was only able to outscore me by a single victory point.

I was also really happy to take home the award for Most Sporting Player. Really happy with it and also that, despite losing all my games (again), I came close on a couple of occasions and the addition of a Knight as well as having some retooled units really amped up the power level of my army. Against casual opponents I might even be able to win some games (if I practice the rules a bit more).

The next day and the final event of 2018 so far was the second Gurash Wars event.

It was fun to meet the guys from Groningen again. I absolutely love the fact that they’re so dedicated to organising true narrative Heresy events. The best thing about the Horus Heresy is the fact that you get to imagine your army in these massive war scenarios and that is exactly what I was getting with the Gurash Wars.

First game was against Sons of Horus. It was a short game due to the scenario being a bit stacked against me. I was allowed to bring fortifications but they didn’t help against the free bombardment that the traitors were given before the game began. I felt relieved that I was able to cause some damage regardless and though I lost the game resoundly, I didn’t leave my opponent unbloodied.

The second game was against an amazing massed assault of World Eaters. It was really fluffy to play against a massed line of berzerkers doing nothing but running and assaulting and screaming like madmen. I’m glad I took the time to be a bit more careful with my model placement this battle. This paid off pretty nicely as I managed to force at least one unit of World Eaters to retreat in the face of rapid firing Ravens. I forget if I lost this game or if it was a draw on scenario points, but I definately felt wiped.

The last game was against Thousand Sons. There were a lot of Sehkmet Terminators deepstriking on the table, so I was prepared for the worst, but due to some succesful maneuvering and a lucky fight between my Contemptor and a Thousand Sons Praetor I was actually able to pull out a win on the objective! It was also good to see the loyalists win a Gurash Wars event for once and I was also very surprised and grateful to win the Best Painted Model award for my Raven Guard Praetor.

So, that’s all for 2018 so far. Next post will contain more of the stuff I’m working on currently and I’ll hopefully be able to stop writing these massive summarised posts and actually go into some detail again.

If you’ve been reading all of this rambling so far: Impressive! Kudos to you! These last 3 posts are no doubt the longest I’ve posted so far. Until next time!

Victory or Death!

2017 In Review Part 2

Welcome back to DaanofWar’s 2017 hobby highlights!

Part 1 left us just before the big wedding. The wedding was great. We had to take an enormous ammount of pictures, sit in chairs, sign papers, eat loads of stuff and party our asses off. Here’s a picture of me and my wife making an attempt at posing for a photo:

So, with all that nonsense out of the way I finally had some time to paint my warhams again:

As can be seen in the images above, I put my Raven Guard on hold for a while and continued the work to rebase my entire Chaos Space Marine army. The new edition of Warhammer 40k was just released and we were going to kick off a campaign at the GameForce, so I really wanted to give my ‘good-old’ chaos marines a bit of love and attention. I had good hopes that they might be viable again with the new rules and I was pretty hyped to see if my old army could come back with a vengeance.

Having rebased most of my marines: This is a shot of my first 500pts battle against Naut’s Grey Knights. Not only did I instantly learn that Grey Knights are pretty good in the new edition, but units of 20 marines die waaay too easily to morale checks. Never again.

During the rest of the campaign I started noticing the pattern that I was not only losing a lot of the games, but that I was also losing them fast. Most of my games were over by turn 3. Also, the hope I had for my chaos army catching a break rules-wise this edition were shattered when it turned out that not only was the core of my army (my 40+ chaos marines with bolters) not very points efficient, but they also lost the option to take an extra close combat weapon. This made my entire army a lot less viable as I found myself stuck with a lot of units that did not excel in any of the 3 main phases of the game.

With each new game I played each month I realised more and more that I needed to do a lot more than rebasing to salvage my chaos army in 8th edition. All of this got me a bit down about the new edition, so I wasn’t that sad when ForgeWorld announced that the Horus Heresy would be staying with 7th edition and I could happily continue working at my Raven Guard again.

Above is the first model that I did when I started working on my RG again. Pretty happy with it and a nice change of pace from the drop pods and the storm eagle that I still had to finish.

Another reason for needing to hurry with my Raven Guard was the upcoming Scale Model Challenge. As you may remember from last year, the Scale Model Challenge is a fairly large miniature painting convention that’s right next door for me and since we had such a blast visiting last year I managed to get us a spot for the club for 2017. The idea we had to wow the crowds was to try and display the sheer ammount of Heresy we have going on at our local club by building a giant Isstvan V display board.

Here’s some work in progress pics of how we built the board:

Thanks to a lot of help from friends we managed to finish the table just in time for the SMC and with all of our armies on top it turned out to be a roaring succes:

Also, to finish my big 3000 point Raven Guard project in style, I took the second half of the army (the part that I painted this year) to Armies on Parade at the Warhammer store in Eindhoven:

I was super proud to have finally finished everything after almost 2 years of working on it and my efforts were rewarded by a nice gold pin for Best Army Theme.

The final thing that I went to in 2017 was the first Gurash Wars event in November. First time I went to a narrative e Horus Heresy event and it was a blast. It was a long way to travel, but it was worth it to take part in the ongoing story and see a lot of cool new Heresy armies. Here are a few impressions of the event:

So that was pretty much it for me in 2017. A lot more has happened so far in 2018 though, so I’ll save all of that for the next post.

Victory or Death!

Migration + 2017 In Review Part 1

Hello and welcome to my brand new WordPress site!

I’ve decided to start blogging again after a year away from my old blog (daan-of-war.blogspot.com). Making the transfer from Blogger to WordPress has been in my mind for a lot longer, but converting all my old posts had always seemed way too much work. Not any more though and I’m proud to say that I’ve been able to save my 7 years of sporadic content!

The last post I made on the blogger blog left me at the cusp of 2017 which I had declared to be the year of my Raven Guard. I also mentioned my Chaos Space Marines and how I was in the process of rebasing them. So, for the sake of keeping track of my hobby, I’ll kick off this new blog with a 2 part report of what I’ve been up to for 2017 and the first part of 2018. So pour yourself some tea and kick back because it’s going to be a long one.

I’ll start off by mentioning briefly that, outside of the hobby, 2017 has been defined for me by getting married halfway through (30th June). This meant that I spent most of the first half of the year in preparation of this outrageous event and didn’t always get much hobby done.

To compensate for lack of hobby we had a wedding invitation image made that at least implies that we spend time painting.

Despite the stressful times, I did manage to see through the Horus Heresy campaign we had going; playing the final few games and culminating the year-long event in a second megabattle:

This was my final regular heresy game (2750 points I guess) against Naut’s fantastic Alpha Legion. Don’t remember much of it, but I most likely lost this battle. You can see that my Mor Deythan were not even painted at this time.

Here are my Ravens during the final 3k per person megabattle. Due to the arangement of tables and sides, the megabattle wound up mainly pitting me against Naut (again) while we had minimal dealings with the world eaters and mechanicum to our left. This was a bit of a pity, but since Joyce couldn’t be around for the whole day I got to control her awesome Word Eaters for a while.

I really like this picture of Joyce’s World Eater force with her awesomely commisioned Legio Audax warhound titan forming up the center. Props to Scar’s Miniature Madness for this amazing piece (not to mention Joyce’s own amazing work on her 45 assault marines!).

Here’s Naut’s cool Alpharius Conversion that I just had to take a picture of.

Overview of the entire megabattle. It was pretty epic.

After the megabattle, I spent the next few months focussed on the impending wedding and getting into rumour arguments with people about the launch of 8th edition Warhammer 40k. Speaking of which: It’s almost been an entire year and I still don’t really know how to feel about it. More on 8th ed in the next post, but around the time of release I wasn’t truly captured by the hype, yet also not as down and out about it either. I was also really glad that they kept the Heresy in 7th after the death of Alan Bligh (long shall he be remembered and his absence felt). To distract myself from buying new stuff in the preparation of a costly wedding I spent the time I had painting and playing my Ravens.

This is a shot from a pick-up game I played against Dirk. Dirk was bummed about his army’s performance in the campaign, but somehow managed to wipe me clean off the table when it appeared my army was no match for an Acastus Knight Titan, Quad Mortars and a Medusa.

And this is what I was left with right before the wedding. My 3k army almost completely painted. Only 2 Drop Pods, A Storm Eagle and Corax himself left to go.

It feels good to be blogging again and I hope the new WordPress website works out. I have a lot more images for the next post so hopefully until then!

Victory or Death!