juli 2020 – Daan of War

Hobby 2020 so far: Slaanesh, The Pile and… Corona.

Now, with 2019 out of the way I can finally talk about what I’ve been up to recently. It’s been a lot and the world around hasn’t been boring about it either. I imagine everyone is like this now, but if I had known what a year 2020 would become…

Ok, so the year for me started out extremely optimistic. Even though I was still a bit shell shocked from the whole divorce ordeal, I was really happy with my new home:

So I decided: New Year, New Army! The Pile was going to have to wait again. I needed something fresh to get excited about and a new way to play the game. I settled on Slaanesh Daemons at the local warhammer store birthday and got the slaanesh half of Wrath and Rapture.

The store manager told me he was going to organise a growth league and that, starting february, I could use the army to play an Age of Sigmar game each month. I was very hyped and all set to build and paint a quick new army.

I was so productive, that I pretty much finished the whole thing (aside from a Soulgrinder I still had to purchase) on the 12th of March. It was the exact weekend before the lockdown happened.

After the lockdown everything started to become a bit unreal. Life began drastically changing. I had to cancel my trip to warhammer world as well as my music festival tickets. I also had to keep working a lot seeing as I work in the pharmaceutical industry. Everything around the covid pandemic still feels unreal to me and even as I’m typing this I’m still afraid of the massive impact I feel this event is going to have on my future. Like a lot of people, I try to cope by concentrating on the things that are still possible, but I’m also kind of bracing for the worst. Making sure I’ve got my life together seems even more important now in 2020 than it did last year.

Hobbywise I decided to dive back into the Pile. I had a lot of heresy stuff as well as random small projects left to complete, so the images below are a good timeline of what I painted from the start of the lockdown until the current date.

Daemon Prince I bought to support my local store during the crisis.

Now, as the world is starting to walk the long and winding road to normality, I have even played a couple of games again (at 1,5m distance):

First post-lockdown game against Stephan’s titanicus.

Now, finally, this weblog has arrived at the current day. The last thing I’ve finished from the Pile were the shattered legion vets and with them, the only things left there are Skaven, Word Bearers and the marines from Indomitus. Three projects, AoS, Heresy and 40k that I’ve decided I’m going to take my sweet time to complete. With the pandemic still controlling our daily lives I want to consolidate everything a bit and that includes my hobbies. Organising the stuff I have and fully enjoying the projects I’m working on. Hopefully from now on I’ll be able to post something new around once a month. Whether that’s Skaven, Word Bearers or 40k will be up to the mood I’m in.

This final thought also brings me back to what I was getting at the start of all these recaps: wargaming and painting miniatures is a great way to glue your life back together when it breaks. It’s fun, creative, social, rewarding of your diligence, able to match your pace and always has something new to find out about. I feel that as long as I manage to stick with it, it’ll help to carry me through whatever these roaring twenties have yet to throw at us.

Thanks for reading!

2019 Part 2

This us the second part of a recap I’m doing of the period between blogs. Check out the first part here.

So, in the last part of the previous post I explained that during the whole divorce period I was still able to run and finish a Horus Heresy campaign. It was a really fun campaign and with our dedicated group of players it really helped me have some fun days to look forward to. There are too many battles to explain in detail, but I made a point to really take some nice pictures this time. So first up, here’s a gallery of some of my favorites:

Now, as I said in the previous post, I had been painting up Sisters of Silence to not only clear some backlog but also to take a really cool, unusual army to a bloodstorm event. I have long had the ambition to expand my Raven Guard into a company sized force, supported by Sisters of Silence, Knights and Militia. Basically, a small expeditionary fleet. This bloodstorm tournament was the first time my army started looking the part:

The rest of the Bloodstorm tournament went really well. So here are some more cool pictures:

I even won the Players Choice award for my army!

After Bloodstorm, it was straight on to preparation for Armies on Parade. I had promised to participate with a combined board built by Dirk, Stephan and myself. We would all build our boards seperately but they’d be able to ‘click’ together for the show. Here are some WIP pictures:

It was the most ambitious project I’ve ever done with scenery building, but it looked amazing on the parade day itself.

All of this was going on during the renovation of my new appartment so, needless to say, this was a very busy time for me. When the time came to attend the Gurash Wars in Groningen in oktober, I was truly spent and decided to stop attending events for a while and focus on getting my life back together and finally start painting that pile I was all on about way back in January.

Finally at ease in my new crib, I got myself a new car and started taking some vanity pictures of my titanicus as wel as adding a knight banner to the collection.

During the rest of the year I tried to spend some time relaxing and painting up a random assortment of stuff from the pile. Didn’t take a lot of pictures of most of it since a lot of it belonged to projects that I had basically completed already. It was a very productive time though and set me up nicely to have a great time 2020. I was super motivated to get back into dating as well as just enjoying life. I made plans for a trip to warhammer world as well as to attend a music festival again. Here are some final pictures of 2019 and I’ll leave the rest for the 2020 recap.

Thanks for reading!

2019 Part 1

This is the first part of a recap of what I’ve been up to in the period in between blogs. Second part will be coming up soon.

In january I posted ‘the year of the pile’ where I vowed to start clearing out my backlog. Terrain was to be my first challenge but first I had to spend some time on the Horus Heresy campaign I started running back in 2018. It was going to be the halfway point in january so I organised a massive megabattle:

Small selection of the many awesome pictures we took.

After the megabattle there was also another Bloodstorm Heresy tournament early february which was again an absolute blast.

Dutch Heresy scene is quite small, but everyone there is an amazing army builder. That’s why heresy remains one of my favorite game systems.

Then I finally finished the terrain I said I’d build in my post and a miniature for the dungeons and dragons campaign I was participating in. However, this was going to be the last hobby I was going to do for a while.

March and April 2019 were completely dominated by the divorce for me and I was not able to do any painting at all during this time. The heresy campaign kept running and I played some games here and there, but it wasn’t until early May that I was able to pick up a paintbrush again.

With all of my warhammer in storage, I wasn’t able to work on any of my existing projects. So much for the year of the pile… Nevertheless, around this time I was starting to recover a bit and I treated myself to a starting box of titanicus as well as an eternal guard box to make myself another D&D character.

During the rest of the summer, the titanicus helped keep me going until I finally had the time to dig up some stuff from the storage box. There was a new bloodstorm tournament coming up so I decided I was finally going to paint my Sisters of Silence.

I finally finished my last Sisters model in september and that brings me to the end of Part 1. I’ll spend one more post to show some stuff from the campaign that finished around this time and the bloodstorm tournament I had prepared for. Because by september I was done with most of the mess from the divorce and I had even bought myself a new apartment that I had to spend time redecorating. So, I’ll end this post with some postive new home pictures and continue with the warhammer in the next post!

Thanks for reading!

Daan of War 2020 Restart

This is the first post of the restarted Daan of War wargaming blog where I explain what I’m doing here and why I’ve decided to restart. Posts from my old wargaming blogs will occasionally be editted and posted retroactively under the [Classic] tag.

Hello again reader!

Welcome to the restarted Daan of War wargaming weblog. I’ve had my own wargaming blog since 2010 and this year I’ve decided to come back to it after more than a year and a half of inactivity. There’s been a good reason for this inactivity and I’ll briefly go into it further down in this post. First though, I want to welcome any new people reading this by telling a bit about myself and what I hope to achieve with the Daan of War weblog.

Hobby History

I started wargaming around the beginning of 2004. Someone in my magic: the gathering / dungeons and dragons high school friendgroup brought along some fantasy dark elves and that immediately set the rest of us off to the local warhammer stores. My friends had called dibs on Brettonians, Dwarfs, High Elves and Dark Elves, which left me to peruse the 6th edition rulebook for something unique. I found Skaven.

The Legendary Clan Rikket in it’s full glory.

In the early years I not only became very active in my local scene, but also online as a member (and eventually administrator) of UnderEmpire.net. Working on my Skaven soon became my favorite thing to do at home and having a fully painted army was my top priority. I got the hang of army building after my Skaven and by 2008 I had also built an Empire army and started cautiously getting into 40k with Tau. After 4 years I was also regularly attending tournaments and even organising international meet-ups with friends I met on warhammer internet forums.

The Knightly Order of the Grey Veil. A raggedy bunch, but already looking a lot better than the rats that they’re hunting.

The full Tau army right before I sold it. Tau just didn’t turn out to suit my playstyle.

The struggle between my Skaven and Niels’ Seraphon is as old as time itself.

Despite my love for warhammer, 2008 was a difficult time for me as I had to drop out of university, work a part time job and move out. This eventually led to me spending less time on the hobby for a few years. I still did the odd tournament in between and that was also the time Warmachine and Hordes really kicked off in my area. When I was done with my first warmachine armies I sold my Tau and started up Chaos Space Marines to get back into warhammer. By the time 2011 rolled around I was much happier and in a way better place. My Chaos marines were in for a serious repaint (I speed-painted them earlier), so I deleted all my old blogposts and started writing this one.

The early beginnings of perhaps what was to be my best army yet.

The Gap Year

So, from the summer of 2011 until the start of 2019 I have been blogging intermittently. These posts will all be reposted in the following weeks and I will also begin adding new posts on a regular basis (weekly I hope). As to why I haven’t been active during the past year there’s a simple explanation: I went through a divorce.

It was just me and my cat, back at my parents’ home.

Only a couple of weeks after my first ambitious post of 2019 (Ironically titled: The Year of the Pile) I was starting to realise my relationship was failing. The decision to divorce came soon after. These were hard times. I lived with my parents for a time as I went through the legal shenannigans, sold off our old house and made arangements for a new appartment. 2019 became a terrible year for me, but at the end of it I felt a lot stronger and better about myself. At the start of 2020 I was feeling very optimistic again and was all set to make 2020 one of the best years yet.

Life apparently had something different in mind.

But then of course: COVID-19 happened. Normally, you’d say you’d get a lot of hobby done when the world is in a lockdown. As it happens though, my job is one of the ones that got busier during the crisis and I also just started dating again. Which basically means that only now, during the summer, as things are slowly beginning to normalise, I felt compelled to start blogging.

The Plan

I have to admit that if it werent for this hobby, and the friends I’ve made through it, I would never have been able to handle last year the way that I did. That’s why I want to continue this weblog as my way of celebrating the hobby.

The next posts are going to be very big updates in which I’ll try to collect everything miniature related I’ve been up to in the meantime. From then on, I hope for this to be a place where I can post occasional hobby updates without too much fuss. Mostly with the aim of entertaining myself and maintaining a diary through the years. Hopefully concentrating on typing some english every once in a while will also help with keeping up my writing standard.

Thanks for reading!