Bloodstorm.nl – Daan of War

September + October Hell Part 1

I’ve been so busy with the hobby these past months that I simply didn’t have time to blog about it! So, to make up for lost time I’m going to do a two part summary of all the amazing things that happened this autumn.

First up is the bloodstorm AoS tournament I was prepping for in the last post. Preparations mostly involved painting some characters and an abomination which you can see included in the army shot above. The games themselves were really fun and with a loss, a draw and a win I felt pretty good about my perfomance gamewise.

The first battle was against the Maggotkin of Nurgle. Basically a lot of trees, daemons, the glottkin and blightkings. Didn’t mind the loss because the battle was pretty fun and my rats held up pretty well despite the power difference in the lists.

Second battle was against someone who hadn’t played a lot of AoS before, but had a pretty fun Slaves to Darkness list with SLAMBO! of all things in it. It was fun to not worry about strategy too much and just create a bunch of cool combats. It ended up as a draw even though it was an incredible game.

Last battle was Horde VS Horde against bonesplitters. My opponent was wielding the infamous arrer boys unit of 90 shots a turn, but thanks to my stormfiends coming in from the flank, that unit didn’t quite perform to its full potential. The rest of the battle was just us slamming our lines into eachother and I won in the end mostly because our time was up. Which is kind of what you get when just moving your guys takes 20 minutes per side.

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Next on the agenda was the third Gurash Wars event. Didn’t have to do a lot of painting for it since it was a centurion event at 1500 points, so I could just take some stuff from my larger army and call it a day. The day was still pretty taxing though. Groningen is roughly around 2 hours away from where I live by car. Not really a fan of driving so any day where I spend at least 4 hours simply staring at a road is not an easy day for me. The event itself was pretty damn cool though. Lots of whacky scenarios and crazy happenings thanks to the points of interest system and the warlord progression table.

First game was against an amazingly painted Emperor’s Children army. Got pasted pretty bad even though my opponent said he was deathly afraid of my plasmagunners and terminators. In the end the terminators proved too slow and the plasma squads were easily taken out by kheres. Got some cool points of interest rolls and some nice warlord bonusses, so that was pretty nice as well.

Second game against Iron Warriors on a zone mortalis board. The zone mortalis and my infiltrate ability caused this game to become a draw (I think), but we mostly just shot at eachother a bit and tried to keep our stuff from dying too much.

This game against Thousand Sons was again a draw if I recall correctly. It all looked to be going really well, until my terminators got creamed by too many bolters and my warlord failed to kill a delegatus. On the other side of the table things evened out as my contemptor killed a sorcerer and some castelax, but the game was really fun in the end. Lots of objectives and points of interest claimed for me.

The last game was a really wierd scenario where the whole game revolved around basically whose warlord could attack the hardest. Luckilly for me my warlord was buffed pretty hard at that point with an extra toughness, extra attack, extra initiative and whatnot, so he proceeded to create so many victory points in the first couple of turns that it didn’t matter that the rest of my army got massacred.

So, that’s it right now for part 1. I’ll try to write up another blog post later this week to post some pictures of the Armies on Parade and Scale Model Challenge events that I went to in october. See you soon!

House Pyke

My summer hobby break has continued somewhat during the last month. Despite very little activity on my personal projects however, I do finally have some cool things to post about.

First up: I finally finished my Imperial Knight!

It took me a long time to finally fix all the transfers, but I’m really happy with it now. The pike designs were custom transfers that I ordered quite a while ago at Fallout Hobbies and it’s nice to see they turned out well. I also tried to include some water effect on the base for the first time.

Another thing that I’ve started up last month is a brand new Horus Heresy campaign called ‘The Knights of Dies Veneris’.

It’s supposed to become a year long campaign where I get to write a lot of stories about everyone’s battles while at the same time things stay pretty casual and people can drop in and out, only having to play 1 game a month. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, so I’m glad I finally had the time to set things in motion. I had a lot of fun writing the stories for the campaign, so if you like to read it might be worth checking out the blog posts on the club website.

As for my own games, I did manage to play a few here and there. Here are some cool pics from a 40k game against Koen’s Knight list and some images from a really cool heresy game against Peter’s Iron Warriors:

This sunday I’ll be participating in another Bloodstorm Age of Sigmar event. I’ve entered a list with several new models I still need to paint for my Skaven army, but with the 120 clanrats out of the way I feel confident I’ll be able to get it done. Next week I’ll probably post some pics from that event and discuss some of the upcoming stuff in October.

120 Clanrats

The reason for the lack of blog posts in the past month is that I had to think of it like this: “If I have time to write a blog post, I have time to paint some clanrats.”

The mentality that I had to be in for the past couple of weeks was insane. In the last post I made on the subject I showed my doomwheel and had just started work on my Stormfiends. So since that post I still had literally one hundred clanrats to paint, a warp lightning cannon, an abomination and 3 stormfiends. I simply had to give up on all of my other free time activities in order to finish it all in time.

In this post though, I’m glad to announce that I did it. Despite having to replace the abomination with 6 jezzails and having to stay up until 3 am the night before the tournament, I managed to paint every single model to a nice tabletop standard.

Here’s some WIP shots of the stormfiends and a picture from the army display at the event itself:

As for the event itself, it was a lot of fun to see so many well painted AoS armies at a Dutch tournament. With 21 players (if I remember correctly) it was the biggest AoS event in the Netherlands so far.

The first game I played was a bye against an amazing Stormcast Eternal army that had been painted to look like weathered statues. It was great fun and because it was a bye game, we both threw competition out the window and focussed on having a fun game with lots of combat.

The second game was against a good friend who also brought his Stormcasts along. This game started out extremely epic with two classic battlelines staring eachother down, but quickly turned into a slaughter. As it appeared I had made some tactical errors with my brand new force, which were compounded by being on the recieving end of a double-turn. The game was still pretty fun despite the one sided result and it gave me some much needed experience.

The third game was against sylvaneth. This game was a lot more balanced casualty-wise as I applied some lessons from the second game and used some pretty effective screening tactics. The scenario and the mobility of the sylvaneth put me at a severe disadvantage however and I lost the game at 2 against 6 vp’s. My opponent was a chill guy though and it was a really fun game. He also obviously put a lot of effort in his painting which was also cool to see.

Once again I can’t overstate how happy I am to have finished my Skaven army finally and being able to use it at the event was the cherry on top. Next post might have some heresy or 40k in it again or perhaps even an abomination?

Glory to The Horned Rat!

The Race is On!

Past few weeks I’ve been spending my hobby time on Skaven again!

I’m participating in the Bloodstorm Age of Sigmar tournament on the 9th of June and I’ll need a 2000 points army to do it. So far my little Skaven horde has not really taken off and I’m about a 100 clanrats short of a solid battleline.

Since I’ve been mentioning a necessity for painted Skaven, Dirk was so amazing as to help me out with an awesome Arch-Warlock for my birthday:

I only needed to spend a little time repainting the base and this bad-ass was good to go! Squeeking of going: The first thing on the list of stuff to get ready was a model that’s been haunting me for over 5 years.

This was a chore to paint, but I’m oh so glad I finally got it done. Finishing a model that you’ve been dreading in, like, forever is an amazing feeling and sometimes very necessary to regain confidence in an army project.

The next things on the table are 3 stormfiends and after that it’s clanrats, clanrats, clanrats. I wasn’t lying that I’d need to do a 100 if I want a solid battleline so despite that being a daunting number, I’m going to have to give it an honest go.

I’m also playing and participating in a narrative 40k campaign that I’ve started to write some fiction for. I’m not sure if I want to post the fiction as a part of this blog or create a full seperate blog for it.

I’ll update this post as soon as I’ve figured it out.

Glory to the Horned Rat!

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!